UX-ing the Park Slope Food Coop
Brian Davis & Lindsay Kovnat
Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop (PSFC) is one of the very few and largest member-run food coops in the country: a thriving community of over 17,000 likeminded individuals who share ownership and staffing responsibilities collectively, working once every four weeks in exchange for saving 20–40% on groceries. Members staff every department throughout the store overflowing with Farmer’s Market-fresh organic produce, ethically and environmentally-sourced meat and dairy, rows of unique groceries, and health products of all varieties.
Beyond obligatory work-shifts, the Coop encourages democratic member engagement and participation in decision-making, its Board of Trustees holding two monthly meetings — General and Agenda Proposal meetings — where members vote for candidates and on various motions. Park Slope Food Coop General Meetings are the best-attended of any coop in the country, with well over 200 members on average. This isn’t all that surprising when one learns members can attend two general meetings per year instead of working their scheduled shift. Thus, democratic member participation isn’t only invited, it’s incentivized and built into the structure of PSFC. With everyone having an equal, active voice in decision-making, planning the organization’s future happens naturally.
In 2012, such active democratic member engagement at the monthly General Meetings erupted into a controversy (a member-proposal to boycott Israeli products) that garnered the attention of Samantha Bee and the Daily Show, who descended on PSFC for some guerilla satire. Broad City also lampooned the Coop (Season 3, Eposode 2), embellishing its strict work-shift mandates and exaggerating its PC-aesthetic to comedic heights.
How and Why I Joined
Despite having lived in Manhattan’s Washington Heights for five years — about an hour-long subway ride from Brooklyn’s Park Slope — so many culinarily-inspired friends and acquaintances sang its praises, I got curious enough to attempt membership. Would those 20–40% discounts be worth it, when I could just bargain-shop between Trader Joe’s, Fairway, and Whole Foods — at least 20 of which stand between me and PSFC? I joined in February 2016. I’m still a member as of October 2017. While my ability to shop has oscillated in these sixteen months — sometimes I can only afford one visit between the every-four-week-work-shifts; at other times, I’m there once or twice a week. I’ve found it more than worth it.
While the discounts are great, and yes, the produce and products are second-to-none, membership means more than savings on great quality food. It’s an active commitment to a vision promising a more ethical, sustainable, participatory, cooperative economic model. This is all the more important given the recent purchase of Whole Foods by Amazon. Like any industry, a lack of competition in a market fosters price-gouging and weakens standards: quality and safety are threatened. It’s bad enough when this happens to cable companies and ISPs; more onerous when applied to food retail.
Day-to-Day Operations
In order to ensure the survival of this much more conscious, worker-owned alternative economic model, PSFC is a tight ship. That can feel overly bureaucratic to members (or a potential cash cow for satirists) anticipating the hippie stereotype most people associate with coops. Managers and squad leaders are anything but lackadaisical; penalties can stack up quickly for missing more than one shift.
Squad leaders (members more involved with full-time managers in each department) oversee and organize each team. When unable to work a shift, members are to contact the squad leader, to ask for a lenient penalty — i.e., only one make-up shift rather than (the defaulted) two. For every no-call/no-show, the penalty is two make-up shifts. Squad leaders have the ultimate discretion meting out and/or forgiving penalties.
In the beginning, with regular part-time work near Park Slope, I never missed a work-shift. By the four-month mark though, when seasonal work began conflicting with my every-fourth-week coop work shifts, I’d tarnished my perfect record. As life got busy and unpredictable, my standing diminished. Despite my best efforts to call ahead and inform them, I quickly realized that receiving department squad leaders are notoriously busy and impossible to reach prior to shifts. Thus, unable to reach them, my efforts are as good as no-call/no-shows. I’ve come perilously close to suspension a few times in nearly two years of membership, and still spend more time at the Coop making shifts up than shopping.
Familiar Problems
Some problems of the operations of this all-member coop are immediately obvious. One is long, static lines of members queued for entry. Check-in workers inform each member of their status before they can proceed to shop: “Active”, “Alert”, or “Suspended.” The latter two statuses tend to spark reactions among members — confusion, shock, anger — which lead to longer discussions taken off the floor to the member-services office upstairs. “But I made up my shift!”; “My squad leader told me he forgave one of my make-ups!”; “But I suspended my membership for 4 months when I was out of town!” This phenomenon is common enough to regularly clog front entry.
Another regular problem is inconsistent shift-coverage. About a sixth the size of the average Whole Foods, accommodating over 17,000 members, overcrowding of the aisles is the standard at PSFC. Unpredictable surges of members randomly arriving for multiple make-up shifts (all at once!) further bloats an already overstuffed situation. Equally unpredictable surges of work-shift absences leaves the store overflowing with unpacked, unstocked produce and product on retail carts when receiving/stocking workers don’t show and unbearable check-out lines when absences fall on the cashier side of the member-staffing equation. Weather and holidays are the best metrics for predicting coincidental understaffing and long check-out lines.
PIC OF SHIFT-SIGNUP
When arriving to work a shift, members find their squad leader to check-in and arrange the time to sign one of the huge attendance binders. Some squad leaders require members to work the full shift before signing; more trustful ones allow sign-in at the beginning of the shift. Plenty of members forget to sign the binder — the culprit for many shocking “warning” and “suspension” statuses. After a few shifts and a few visits to the member-services office, I was subconsciously aware of PSFC’s dependence on all these paper forms for tracking and updating member information. A quaint relic of a paper-document-based ecosystem, indeed.
At orientation, as brand-new members, amidst all the other information about the functioning of the coop overloaded into an hour-long presentation, we are introduced to the shift-swap feature on PSFC’s website. After a few months of perfect attendance, followed by a few missed shifts, I had all but forgotten about this shift-swapping option (which I had learned of, once, over 3 months prior). While making up one of my two double-shifts to avoid suspension, a fellow member reminded me of it — which I finally resorted to using, by the time I realized I’d be unable to work my next shift.
PSFC’s Online Shift-Swap Feature
A member can access the website’s “Arrange a Shift-Swap” via the landing page, in the “Working at the Coop” box, by clicking the link in green. Upon locating the appropriate department, a member can post their own shift, search for a swap, or both. The example to the left is a typical swap post.
As indicated in red, there were 53 matching (receiving squad) ads, displayed 15 per page, that I could peruse until I found a member with whom to swap. Were I interested in swapping with Nigel Jackson, I’d simply “Reply” to his add with my email and a message.
So I did. I told Nigel I’d love to exchange his upcoming 5:30 AM Monday (A-week) shift with my 8 AM (A-week) the following Saturday. I waited two days. Nigel never responded. Returning to the shift-swap ad-page with more determination, I sent out six separate offers to switch shifts, asking each member to respond via text for more immediacy. I received three email responses, saying “Sorry, I got it covered already”, two people not responding at all, and finally, a day before my shift, by divine intervention, perhaps, I successfully switched shifts with someone!
While simple enough in theory, attempting to swap a shift proved a stressful, grueling test of endurance. The next time I used it, I took the more proactive approach, posting my own shift-swap ad. This was just as stressful as, away from my laptop, on the subway, I tried creating and posting a swap using my iPhone. On this very 1996-era ad-board. Midway through, I gave up. The two-shift penalty is far less painful than the trauma of trying to lasso a shift-swap.
Although annoying, I accepted the antiquated shift-swap feature, like the endless binders full of paper documentation, as quaint and adorable: Whole Foods has the means to trudge ahead with a fancy mobile app full of coupons, bells and whistles. PSFC will remain Luddite in its purity. I’d just need to alter my life a little to fit my every-four-week coop shift: maybe turn down occasional opportunities to make money in order to work a 2.75 hour shift for free — just so long as I don’t have to miss a shift or, God forbid, find a swap.
That was my plan. Until I began talking to other members about PSFC’s online shift-swap feature. It quickly became obvious I wasn’t alone. Fellow members were animatedly candid about their own frustrations finding shift-swaps, whenever I’d bring it up —be it during one of my many make-up shifts or standing in line for over thirty minutes when half the cashiers unsurprisingly didn’t show on a perfect-weather Saturday. “I’ve tried that shift-swap thing a week ahead of my shift and got no response” was as common a refrain as “I used it once, but took so much effort, I haven’t used it since.”
The Quest to Make PSFC More User-Friendly
At an event unrelated to the coop, I learned that my friend and fellow UX design strategist, Lindsay Kovnat, is also a member. We cathartically lampooned PSFC’s almost comically-absurd user experience flaws, simultaneously recognizing some potentially great design opportunities. Extended conversations spanned beyond the frustrations of the the shift-swap feature of the current website to imagining a broad array of possibilities for a reimagined website or mobile app — like the ability to keep track of one’s own status-updates without having to check-in with the office or front-desk; a more responsive means to request new product lines; work-shift reminders; new product updates with filtered fields of interest; checking-in for a work-shift digitally with geo-location to hasten the posting of a shift worked and, hence, one’s activity status.
While promising possibilities flooded our imaginations, the shift-swapping opportunity seemed the most obvious, most immediate need to address. It was worth at least testing our hypothesis: PSFC could benefit from a digital solution. Perhaps to help members more easily swap-shifts? Perhaps something else members struggle with regularly, which we were as-yet-unaware? …
Our hunch — members would support a solution that eases the frustration of the current shift-swapping system — had to be validated. If only a tiny fraction of the member-body found it useful, it wouldn’t be worth it. We created an informal questionnaire in Google Docs and proceeded to the store a few times a week seeking members willing to fill it out. After a few sign-up sessions at the store, we attended our first General Meeting with our sign-up sheets in hand, floating the idea of the eventual creation of a PSFC app.
Getting Member Feedback from Our Survey
While a few advised us to propose our idea to PSFC’s IT department, a few other members mentioned having heard about or attempting something similar (a Coop app) in the past, with either sluggishness or push-back from that IT department. Sure enough, after multiple attempts to meet with PSFC IT staff, with assurances that we’d be contacted in a few days, we have yet to hear back from them. Over a half a year later.
The very thoughtful administrator with whom we spoke did, however, mention that PSFC was not, in fact, interested in a mobile app — that the revisions then underway to update the responsive website would suffice to making the shift-swapping feature more user friendly. When we attempted to argue our case for the necessity of a mobile app — that an app designed for mobile use would make the time-consuming process of shift-swapping more convenient, and ultimately more successful; that mobile applications are the common currency of digital solutions because people are less likely to sit at a lap- or desktop interface to solve a problem — we received a slightly more open-minded, if still hesitant, hearing.
Rather surprisingly, standing before over 200 members at what can at times be a Daily Show-worthy rancorous General Meeting, our idea roused the gathering to a brief standing ovation(!), followed by our picture and a blurb in PSFC’s newsletter, Linewaiter’s Gazette.
The enthusiastic reception at the General Meeting was as promising as the results of our online survey. Having collected over 200 contacts for our survey, we received 67 responses in the few proceeding weeks. Our mostly open-ended questions screened for smartphone-savvy members willing to participate in deeper, qualitative interviews. Beyond sourcing many ideal willing participants, the responses to the questionnaire were remarkably insightful themselves.
The problem most common to quantitative survey results — of users half-heartedly filling out forms, simply to win a prize — is absent here. PSFC members are ideal survey takers (so long as the survey is about PSFC perhaps), willing to go beyond just clicking boxes. Most members took time to write thoughtful responses to short-answer questions. The results are a perfect starting point to probing the consciousness of the Coop Family.
Survey Insights
Over 60% of the members surveyed are 25–45; a third are 10+ year veterans; respondents closely reflect the ratio of committee/squad staff across the store, with 35% in receiving, 20% shopping/cashiering, 16% food processing, 9% grocery-cart member-walkers, 5% office assistants, etc. Although a majority (60%) make the effort to call when they can’t work, under 40% use the website’s feature to arrange a shift-swap. A cursory processing of this data shows why staffing remains unpredictable — some shifts overloaded, some underloaded with and without members randomly making-up double shifts.
Unsurprisingly praises of “produce, trust and community” surface repeatedly as responses to “Why I’m a member”, “overcrowding” dominates among the “most frustrating things about the Coop”, followed by pains of shift scheduling bureaucracy, especially and explicitly regarding the current online shift-swapping ad-board. Another common trait shared by a majority of members is iPhone ownership (80%) and use of Google Calendars for tracking and work-shift reminders (75%).
To get a question answered, about half of those surveyed call the office; 40% search through the website or via email.
Perhaps most illuminating, overflowing with creative solutions, were responses to the survey’s most direct question: “How could technology be used to foster more immediate, accessible communication between members and department-staff, contributing to greater member involvement overall?”
While a clear majority want “an app,” they want one designed for a specific purpose: to keep track of shifts, schedules, and swapping.
“Easier ways to find a shift swap — the exchange of numbers and calling is exhaustive and often ineffective.”
“A text reminder when a shift is coming up instead of an unknown number phone message that I end up not listening to…”
Following a universal demand for shift and swap options, other popular ideas imagined by more than a few include a simplified product-request process; access to the same personal status info as the office; the ability to affirm what’s in stock in real time; and general coop updates and notifications — via app, email or text.
Surprisingly, no members demanded access to informative features of the website, such as easier access to Linewaiter’s Gazette, General Meeting info, or the impressive in-house, salacious picture-rich, updated produce list. PSFC members seem to be designers at heart: they understand a digital product is only as good as the ease with which it solves a real-life problem. They also recognize the function-specific nature of an app, as opposed to a website (however responsive, as is that of PSFC).
In-Depth Member Interviews
In the midst of recording and analyzing this quantitative data, we interviewed fellow members whenever we had time — both casually in the store and contextually in their apartments. Parallel to insights illuminated by the online survey, many members appreciate the website’s informative features, including the work-shift rotation calendar and updated produce-list. By interviewing members more intimately, we obtained a deeper contextual analysis, discovering many consistent themes — about the pains, pleasures, and hopes of the PSFC user experience.
“Sometimes there are too many workers, people making up shifts without signing up. I’ve heard there are times when there aren’t enough workers too.” — Sam, 36, 5 year member
“It would be nice to see that my shifts are properly recorded .” — Aaron, 29, 8 month member
“A coop app with push notifications about favorite items would be great!” — Joanna, 45, 6 year member
“Swapping shifts is a great idea, but hard to do now through the website; I tried it once, but I always forget password, and it just takes too long!” — Atiya, 33, 14 year member
“I use the website’s produce-list to make my own shopping-lists … Maybe figure out how people can contribute their area of expertise in their fields to the coop?” — Greg, 41, 7 year member
Affinity Mapping to Discover Themes
With so much data, we untangled ourselves from the digital sphere to make sense of it all, using white boards to affix Post-It Note quotes to, each interviewee with a designated color.
After posting all the quotes, we took time coupling similar quotes by different people to discover certain themes or trends. After these groupings, we broke larger groups further into smaller groups.
The groupings resulted in themes familiar to the most casual member and most devoted UX designer alike: Introduction/Time; Shift /Squad (member working schedules); Shopping Process; Shopping Frequency; Store Crowding; Community; Produce Quality; Member Office; Bureaucracy/Democracy; and Coop Competition.
With our careful, open-ended qualitative and quantitative questioning of PSFC members, who were remarkably thoughtful and responsive in offering feedback, we formed general problem statements for the main two types of PSFC members: workers and shoppers.
Problem Statements
Workers need an improved way to arrange their schedule and easily swap shifts with other members — a less burdensome, streamlined working process.
Shoppers need a more comfortable shopping experience, specifically less crowding of aisles.
One constraint we clearly haven’t addressed in seeking to solve common problems of working and shopping member/volunteers is that of squad leaders or full-time staff: how might a digital solution make their lives easier? Unfortunately, none of the members we interviewed were member-service office staff, so beyond hearsay, we had little proof that the office is inundated with repetitive calls regarding staffing, shift-swapping, etc. Nonetheless, data from the survey and interviews suggest that the office is likely swamped with very repetitive, similarly themed calls from confused members.
Furthermore, our experience as observant members suggests staffing confusion and anxious squad leaders is the norm: squad leaders regularly ask volunteers in need of make-ups to stand in when the store is understaffed, over the intercom. Our objective is to design an easier shift-swapping solution — our MVP, a mobile app /feature— which becomes utilized by working members. Through it, over time, estimating staff shortages/overages might be easier for full-time staff and squad leaders.
Personas
To breathe life into our research discoveries, we created two distinct PSFC member personas — a worker and a shopper —whose needs we would seek to address in our mobile design.
Since shoppers are workers and vice versa, the needs of Walter and Silvia are not that disparate. Both need to know their activity status and are frustrated navigating their way through an overcrowded store; both use Google Calendars on their iPhones. Thus, a more immediately gratifying mobile shift-swapping feature could, at least initially, help resolve overcrowding of PSFC suffered by both Walter and Silvia (not to mention squad leaders and full-time staff, stressed by the prospect of multiple call-outs, no-shows, or over-surges of make-up workers).
Constraints: Consulting Developers for Feedback
Obviously, prospects beyond shift-swaps are seemingly infinite. Should members find it valuable, they could vote to integrate the app with member-services and entryway status-checkers. Through iteration of the app, squad leaders might, for example, send push notifications to members in need of make-ups, who’ve set the app to receive such notifications when alerted. And/or, squad leaders could become app administrators, to toggle a radio-dial indicating current staffing status: Red (signaling to members “Don’t come in for a make-up now!”) for “Over-staffed”; green (signaling, “Go to the coop to make up a shift, now, please!”) for “understaffed” — further simplifying the regulation of staffing PSFC.
Before devolving into endless feature possibilities without a solid, functional MVP, we consulted fellow members Allon and Kate, two of a few fellow PSFC web developers who offered their advice and possible services during email-collection at the General Meeting. With council and willingness to assist in the eventual building of the app, they were as helpful as they were gracious: both affirmed that the constraints of the app should not veer past a functional shift-swapping feature, perhaps with a basic member ID login. The design would be complex enough without adding any extra magic.
They estimated a 2–4 month delivery date of this MVP app/feature, depending on the time a developer or small team could devote to it. This prospect presented other variables — such as how developer PSFC-members might be incentivized or compensated, should they take on this labor of love. Both agreed that credit for shift hours worked would be fair compensation. Proceeded down this path, we recognized the potential for an eventual tech committee, as any app needs iterative updates.
Market Research: Analysis of Scheduling Apps
Embracing the constraints, we discovered and tested other shift-scheduling/swapping apps such as Branch, Shyft, Volunteer Scheduler Pro, and Nurse Grid, comparing these to the Coop’s current online shift-swap feature. While no specific food-coop staff-scheduling app exists, each has exemplary solutions for a broad array of users, from service industry staff to nonprofits and nurses.
Findings from analysis
As is immediately evident from a glance at the feature analysis to the left, the four apps we analyzed shared many important traits missing from PSFC’s online shift-swapping feature. This analysis helped us decide what to consider, given the best practice of these established apps. It started becoming clear how we could adopt some unique features of these apps for PSFC.
SHYFT
Shyft is intended for a small team of service industry staff, having no broad filters. Each shift posted by a team member seeking a swap contains an illustration, inside a large rectangular box in a scrolling-list format. Adopting this format directly — no filters and lists of available shifts to pick-up/swap — would be exhausting and could scroll endlessly for PSFC member-users. However, with a filter, such list-view scrolling could be viable.
Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Shyft is the lighthearted, inviting, fun interactions the user has with the adorable Shyftmunk mascot. The messaging prompts change according to the user’s needs — an R&R beach motif for requesting coverage when away for a vacation; the Shyftmunk dressed in a three-piece, smoking a cigar, covered in money for picking up a shift. It also allows traders to offer an extra tip to further incentivize co-workers to swap. Shyft allows users to control shift and schedule notifications in settings.
NURSE GRID
An app developed by nurses, who often work shifts across various hospitals, Nurse Grid has an extensive profile page, profile pic access and notification settings — allowing a profile to be public or private — including a history of jobs worked, places, credentials. It features separate calendar settings for sharing and adding to the user’s default iPhone/Google calendar.
While not as lightheartedly fun as Shyft, Nurse Grid strikes a balance between fun and serious: users are encouraged to share fun pics, but the primary focus/landing-page, is the schedule/calendar. There are three clickable options directly above the calendar which afford the user the ability to (1) peruse their upcoming scheduled shifts,“My Events”, (2) see the list of available shifts nurses in their database are seeking to shift, “Swaps”, and (3) consider all the open shifts, for those looking to pick up more hours, “Open Shifts”. These options are defaulted via calendar-view, but can alternately be viewed as scrolling event-lists via the upper-left hamburger menu.
The most gratifying aspect of Nurse Grid is its excellent UI transaction-approval notifications. Once a shift is swapped successfully by both parties, the final image is a green “Swap Accepted” banner with arrows pointing between the two users, indicating confirmation. This clear, succinct notification specifically addresses over-saturation of various means of contact for swapping/covering shifts PSFC members complained of. It eliminates the confusion of how many means of contact to include when posting a swap, or which among those to choose from when contacting a member to offer to swap, as well as the status remaining open even after the swap is filled — a problem of the current Shift-Swap feature, lest the poster manually removes it from the ad-board (a rare occurrence, even for the most mindful members).
BRANCH & VOLUNTEER SCHEDULER PRO
Branch looked to be a promising comparative app initially. Unfortunately, administrators blocked our research efforts rather quickly, insisting that we purchase a trial or provide a workplace with a contract. Thus, with such proprietary barriers, and an app similar to Shyft in its tailoring to service industry needs, our exploration of Branch was cut short.
Volunteer Scheduler Pro, however, was very generous with their free two-week trial, providing a company contact through the process. An app specifically addressing the needs of non-profits with volunteer staff schedules, it favors practicality over charm or fun — its mobile app, a no-frills extension of its labor-intensive, desktop-based backend, which someone must spend untold hours programming. Although the app is simple and functions well once all the necessary data is entered, we eschewed it and the aforementioned Branch in favor of the backend-free Shyft and Nurse Grid.
Wireframing the Prototype
We designed multiple screens using the lo-fi wireframing application Balsamiq for Walter, our persona. A profile page with relevant information: name; member number; shift schedule; and squad leader contact info. To the right of each banner, icons link to options (a bell for setting notifications, arrows for shift-swapping; a pen for updating contact info). Also, both a calendar- and list-view of shift schedules, which can be switched via the icon at the upper left.
In Swaps, the user enters preferred times and dates of availability. This filters for swaps other members have posted. Walter’s results — members open to swap his shift — only include users who have, in turn, filtered for their preferred shift times and dates (including his Sunday morning shift, 24 September, in this case).
While filtering a calendar takes time, it significantly reduces the time one currently spends pruning through sprawling lists of random shifts, considering and reaching out to each individual post. We are still deliberating confirmation of the swap — will it notify that a swap request is “pending” until the receiving member accepts the swap? or will a matching swap be instantly, automatically accepted? We look forward to allowing the UX testing process to inform this decision.
ONLINE SHIFT-SWAP UPDATE
As office staff with whom we spoke assured us, over the interim months of our design project, PSFC’s IT team updated the website’s painfully antiquated shift-swap feature. While certainly an improved aesthetic, beyond displaying posted swaps chronologically, the functional hurdles remain largely intact.
While seeing a chronological list is a slight improvement to random posts in no order, navigating through these available swaps is still a tedium, requiring focus and commitment. The pre-programmed browsing filters for finding a swap to fill are by committee — making browsing for open swaps across multiple committees impossible. Each committee has its own long list to be sifted through — each poster must be contacted individually, with the same unpredictable, frustrating results.
The member services staff was hopeful that the forthcoming updated shift-swap feature would be more manageable for mobile users — that improving the responsiveness of the website would be more adequate for mobile users.
Having attempted to post a swap via an iPhone, unfortunately, familiar pain-points emerged: lists of tiny-text boxes to fill for posting a swap with redundant or possibly inaccessible information— “Which days and times can I work (Where is my calendar)?”, “What is my member number?”, “What if I can work multiple committees?”
Similarly familiar pain-points are discovered when browsing for swaps with the updated website feature, as evidenced above: shifts are listed chronologically, but still require the user’s careful attention. It limits searching to only one of several committees.
THE COOP APP
While walking through the entry without a member ID card on the heels of creating our prototype, Lindsay was asked “Do you have the coop app?” Taken unawares, we stepped out to search the App store and Google for anything “Coop App” related. Sure enough, we immediately discovered and downloaded the app nine-year PSFC vet and web developer Jonah Burke was creating, just as we’d been conducting research and designing wireframes.
It sends a daily list of new produce, tells you about local farms, shows up-to-date prices, and helps members stay on top of their shifts. One admittedly superfluous feature lets you search the Coop newsletter back to the ’90s. It’s a great source of Brooklyn-related weirdness.
Articles about the new app
Jonah’s app makes makes the responsive website fully mobile. It’s equal parts informative, simple, and user-friendly: the “Home” navigation including open/office hours, the current work-slot week with the a personal “Next Shift” notification; up-to-date produce arrivals notification; office contact and website url. The “Produce” section provides a complete list of all produce in the store & their sourced farms. “Gazette” includes direct links to the Linewaiter’s Gazette newsletter; “Card” affords users the ability to scan their member card into the app and sign in card-free at the entrance desk.
The “Work” section of Jonah’s app is most consonant with the member-needs our UX research addressed. While it presently provides a solution for members confused about their schedules (affording the option to sync upcoming shifts with a phone-based calendar), our mobile shift-swapping design would certainly make intuitive sense here.
So, almost as soon as we discovered Jonah’s delightful app, we met with him at a nearby Park Slope cafe to share the research we’d conducted and the rationale for our prototype. He obliged us graciously with kindness, excited by the prospects a shift-swapping fix will have for the future of the coop and the app he laboriously created.
