Wicked Problems
Ironhack UX/UI Project 1 Case Study
Introduction
I joined Ironhack UX/UI Design Bootcamp in November 2022 and our first project was called “Wicked Problem”.
Whats is a wicked problem?
”A class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision-makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.” — Horst Rittel
For this project we were divided in different groups and each group was assigned to a specific topic as a design challenge. Our topic was “Food sustainability”.
Scope of the project
The scope of the project was to try to help people access local seasonal produce, while also fostering fair and honest relationships between producers and customers.
We started our project based on the Design Thinking process, which involves five phases — Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.
- Empathize
The first step was conducting a secondary research to better understand the topic. We collected a lot of useful information that we put together on Miro. We started brainstorming about possible questions for our first survey. We filled the Lean Survey Canvas, which helped us to prepare the survey faster. We managed to create the survey with 11 questions, and we later shared it on different platforms.
After that, we started preparing our interview. We quickly came up with a lot of questions and we selected the ones that we felt were more accurate. At the end we split into different groups and we started interviewing people. We interviewed people from Ironhack and later friends, family members and so on.
The scope of the survey and the interviews was to collect data to identify our potential users.
We collected enough quantitative and qualitative data from the survey.
- 74% of people who participated in the survey were very interested in sustainability.
- Most of the people were between 26–34 years old. They live in a capital or in a big city, they are employed, and buy groceries for themselves or maximum for 2 people.
- They are currently buying local and they trying to be more sustainable by reducing the packaging.
- One of the main pain points was that sustainable food is too expensive and most of the time the local shops are too far.
2. Define
Survey results and interviews insights gave us a lot of data about our users and their pain points. We selected those insights that we thought were more relevant and we created an Affinity Diagram. An Affinity Diagram is a method used to organize a large amount of data into groupings based on their natural relationships.
We created a header for each group, which captures the essential link among the ideas contained in the group. After discovering a relationship among two or more groups we arranged them in columns under a super header.
The last step was voting for those insights that we wanted to focus on.
Based on the interviews insights we came up with a number of possible ways to solve our users problems by reframing those insights into a How Might We Statements (HMW):
- HMW help users to buy seasonal and organic food without spending too much?
- HMW help them to access to the closest local shops/ farmers?
- HMW help user to get all the information they need when shopping for organic food?
We moved on to the Empathy Map, a tool that helped us to have a better understanding of our users, their perspectives and behavior.
Based on the insights given by the interviews and the empathy map we were able to create our User Persona.
A persona is a fictional character which represents certain traits and qualities of real users.
Claudia, our Persona, represents those users that are really motivated about the environment and living sustainable but at the same time due to the lack of time, money and information they struggle to achieve their goals.
“ I want to improve my consumer habits to decrease my impact on the environment”
After creating our Persona we worked on the User Journey.
A Customer Journey map is a visual or graphic interpretation of the overall story from an individual’s perspective of their relationship with an organization, service, product or brand, over time and across channels.
Creating a User Journey was very useful as it gave us an idea on how users could possibly interact with our solution.
Based on our Persona’s main pain points we finally defined our Problem Statement, which helped us to define the main issue that needs to be addressed:
“Young full-time employees need to find a way to access local, seasonal and organic food without spending too much and without going to the shop physically, because they don’t have enough time or have a limited budget.”
3. Ideate
We started the ideate process with the so-called Crazy 8’s method. We quickly sketched some possible designs for our idea, which in this case was an app the would help our users in buying seasonal and organic food directly from local producers/ farmers.
We selected the most interesting ideas and we redesigned them to create a possible user flow:
4. Prototype
Wireframing is an essential step in any design process. It allows you to define the information hierarchy of your design, making it easier for you to plan the layout according to how you want your user to process the information.
We digitally created Lo-Fi Wireframes on Figma and we add all the necessary interactions to build our first Prototype.
The app allows our users to login into their account and then choose among 3 different options:
- Shop Online: with this option they can buy seasonal and organic products among different categories and they can choose for a home delivery or pick them up directly from the shops.
- Infomation: users can learn more about sustainability, what products are seasonal in that specific period, latest news and so on.
- Local Shops: users can search for the closest local shops/farmers, check their reviews and offers and buy directly from them, choosing between home delivery or pick up.
5. Next steps:
- Testing the prototype. We were not able to test our prototype for this project but it’s something that we will definitely do in the near future to get some feedbacks.
Conclusions
This was our first project and I can say I’m extremely proud of what we achieved. What I enjoyed the most was deepening what I learned in the pre-work, getting more familiar with Figma, and having a better understanding of the whole UX design process.
