“Transforming Food Sustainability: A UX Design Odyssey from Wicked Problem to Low-Fi Prototype”
For my first Ironhack project I was tasked with trying to solve a Wicked Problem! 👿
A wicked problem is defined as problem that is ambiguous and the best solution might not even exist. As a UI UX designer it is my responsibility to come up with solutions to this problem. (I mean challenge! Everyone loves challenges but hates problems right…)
Ironhack teamed us up into groups of four and off we went into our merry little Zoom rooms to begin addressing this issue. The project had a 2 week deadline and we were thrown in the deep end, not knowing each other, how to use FigJam or what the hell we were doing 😱
After the initial shock and horror had subsided we managed to cast a vote on which one of the potenial five case studies we would like to chose. We ‘semi’ democratically decided on FOOD SUSTAINABILTY.
As people are becoming aware of good nutrition and the benefits of eating healthily, the organic food market has BOOMED!! 💣 But mostly for those who can afford it! Additionally, as supermarkets profit massively from this new enterprise while farmers themselves and local producers are not.
The challenge
How Might We help people access local seasonal produce, while also fostering fair and honest relationships between producers and customers?
Ironhack wanted us to use our time over the course of the week to research, define, ideate and devise a low-fi app that tackles a specific, detailed and narrow problem, within the context of this statement. The idea had to be a potenial solution that could help improve peoples lives!
So, how on earth (or soil😜) do we begin with such a challenge….
Design Thinking
The most useful and productive way to tackle any design problem is with the Design Thinking methodology.
As you can see from the image bellow this is a continuous process. You don’t just begin with empathize and end at test. After testing you can either go back to re-empathizing what you have now learnt or you can go back to ideation and with the new insights make changes there. It never ends, only the product gets better each time.
As a team we wanted to start with empathy. Get our heads into the users problem. This begins with interviews and surveys.
BRAIN STORM!!
We all got together over Zoom and using our FigJam files began writing down on digital post-it notes anything that came to mind when we thought of Food Sustainability. Where to buy it? Who can afford it? Where did it come from? How is it being produced? Why do people eat it?
Next it was Secondary Research.
Secondary research, also known as desk research or, in academic contexts, literature review, refers to the act of gathering prior research findings and other relevant information related to a new project. It is a foundational part of any emerging research project and provides the project with background and context. https://www.nngroup.com/
We began scrolling the internet, reading articles, posts, blogs, Medium posts and even asking good ol’ ChatGPT 🤖
From this ‘secondary research’ we could begin to formulate and refine our brainstorming session into some key takeaways and summarize the issue. Within the team we shared our finding and clustered them into categories. This visual method is fantastic because you can see in front of you where the main findings are taking you…
INTERVIEWS — Deep insight
To begin the process of interviewing firstly we had to write a Research Plan
and start to define our learning objectives. Mission accepted!!
- What's the background:
We want to find out how we can connection
farmers who produce seasonal, organic and local produce with consumers in an honest and fair way.
2. What are our research goals:
To understand challenges users face when ordering / purchasing organic food
Is fair trade certification important?
3. Who is our target audience:
Anybody who purchases food in household
Age range 21years +
All genders
Currently / Willing to buy local seasonal produce
living in an urban area
4. What are our assumptions:
Organic food is not affordable for everyone
It’s difficult to get
They have a tight budget
People don’t know enough about organic food to make this decision
That people care about fair trade
Producers are happy to sell direct to customers
We could now start to formulate an interview guide and dry run the interview itself, stealing a student from one of the other groups as our little guinea pig 🐁 (The rat was the closest emoji I could find to a guinea pig. sorry.)
As a team we all wrote an intro, two warm up questions, three main questions and a wrap up statement.
To cast our votes on which of them would make it to the first draft we used a really cool system called, Dot Voting. This is were each member of the team gets given three dot stickers and is allowed to place them on any of the post-it notes they want to include. Once the dots are all used up its counting time!
With the first interview draft at hand and the interviewee present, my team mate took the lead in asking the questions and the rest of us wrote notes. It was really handy that I had practiced this during the pre-work because humans can talk super fast dude!
You really don't want to miss a single sentence or you could miss a vital insight.
Following this premilitary interview and the after thanking her for her time, we got to work on refining the FINAL interview script.
That evening we all took it upon ourselves to interview friends, family, neighbours, politicians, whoever we could think of that fit our target audience.
That was it, we now had our Qualitative data 🙌
AFFINITY DIAGRAM — Similarities.
The next step in the UX process was to create an Affinity Diagram. This is where we extract important insights from our interview notes. These needed to be short and concise.
We then clustered these notes, in silence. Ssshhh!
Each person would grab one of the post-it notes and move it into an area of the board, automatically starting a natural categorization process. The reason we were to remain silent was so that we didn't inform each others opinions and notions / interpretations of the notes.
I really enjoyed this process! Not only was it tiding up the chaos, it was fascinating to see how the notes begun to group together. You could start to pick up on running themes within the interviewees comments.
This act of diverging and converging, of opening up the dialogue and then closing it down as we refined ideas, is called The Double Diamond Model.
After the process of labelling them into themes, we used the dot voting system again to vote on three either individual post-its, clusters or a super group that resonated with us.
It appeared that Accessibility was the way forward…
HMW’s
Now we knew what the main pain point of customers were, we could begin to write HMW’s.
HMW stands for ‘How Might We’.
These are brief summaries of an issue within the broader context, rephrased as an actionable question. We took the pain points and insights of our users and then wrote these as in a more positive term that our team could potentially answer.
(And bellow you can see a few of our HMW questions we formulated as a team. You can see my contribution at the top! But Antonio managed to get two brilliant HMW’s on the board, damn him.)
If your reading this your still with me, thank god, I know its a lot to digest but I promise soon we get to the fun stuff 😅
Problem Statement
We now have enough insight to start to formulate the Problem Statement. I can tell you, this was no easy feat! I think this was the first time as a team that we got proper stuck. (Hang on let me check my notes from that day, I'll be right back…)
What is a Problem Statement?
“Fall in love with the Problem, not the solution”
Its about braking the brief down into a precise description of the problem you are trying to solve and what you are trying to achieve. Its about combining the User needs + the Business needs.
Its a tough challenge because you need to be really on the point and not try to solve too many problems in one. Its about coming in from the Users point of view, from their perspective.
It is handy because later on, after the design process we can refer back to the statement and ask ourselves, “Did we solve this!?” If we didnt then something went wrong along the line, if we did then we did our jobs (and research) well!
Below is the statement my team and myself came up with regarding our Wicked Problems challenge;
User Persona + User Journey map
Following these previous step we could now begin to create what is called a User Persona! This was a fun process. We had to each come up with what we considered our main user would look like. What kind of lifestyle they had, what brands they use, what needs and pains they have surrounding the subject. We could draw upon all of our previous research and data and start to put this character or ‘persona’ together bit by bit. 🧩
My team all voted that the person should be a women and we agreed it would be likely she had children, as this was the main demographic of our interviewees. We knew this from our first phase of interviews and desk research. They had told us that taking children food shopping was particularly difficult, no only to make the time but also to keep the children happy and entertained whilst at the supermarket.
We described her as the;
Natural Food Seeker!
And her main needs are finding nutritious and delicious food for her family without compromising convenience. She’s someone who loves her family and has there health in mind! She’s a super mum!
Her main pain points are the accessibility to all those nutritious foods (hmmm 🤤) but also that organic food at the supermarkets doesn’t contain enough reliable information. Reliable is key here, there is a lack of trust when it comes to buying from large food chains.
This persona is really useful for us designers because we can print it big and stick it up on the wall, so that when ever we make a decision regarding the app, we can ask ourselves questions such as;
“Would Laura use this? Would Laura like this? Is this feature helpful for Laura?…”
The User Journey map is like a continuation of the User Persona. However it puts us in a real life situation that Laura might be in. We thought of the moment she might realise she needs food all the way to the moment she can provide that food to her hungry kids. The graph shows how she might be feeling during that journey. Is she happy, angry, sad, stressed etc. We can plot a path and see exactly where and when those emotions are triggered. At any given fluctuation we can ask ourselves another…that right you guessed it, a HMW question. You can see bellow that in her dip, when she realises the food at the supermarket isnt what see wants, we ask;
“How Might We make it easy for her to get locally sourced produce all year round?”
It gives the UX designers a visual representation of moments in Lauras life were we can begin thinking of solutions to her pain points.
Ideation & Brain storming
Ah this is my favourite part of the whole process! I love it because I get to use my creativity and come up with all these lovely ‘potenial’ solutions!
Of course 99% of them will be garbage! but any input in a creative process is helpful and it could be just that 1% provides that brilliant idea!
Just like earlier with the double diamond, we are now opening back up again expanding our thinking and concepts. We defer judgement and entertain openness.
The teachers suggested we try what is called the “CRAZY 8" It sounds like a Tarantino film right!? But its this fun exercise where you have 8 minutes to come up with 8 ideas. You grab a pen and sticky note and set a 1 minute timer. When the timer goes off, boom, onto the next idea. No hesitation. It stimulates the brain and forces you to think harder. As humans we have this natural pressure to produce when a timer is present and this process exploits that to the MAX!!
You can see above all the ideas my team came up with in just 8 minutes. We can do an advanced equation (that even Einstein would have trouble understanding but don't worry I got you) to calculate how many ideas that produced in the time frame;
* 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 = 32 *
32 ideas in 8 minutes!! That some great value for money. We noticed that three of the four designers had actually drawn the same solution, that was a fantastic moment because we knew that we were all on the same path. After a round of dot voting we decided to go with it,
👩🌾 “A moving neighbourhood farmers market” 👩🌾
Low Fidelity Designs
With the concept now decided we began sketching low fidelity wireframes of possible solutions to the challenge. Wireframing in this way, much like the Crazy 8, allows ideas to flow. Its less a case of making beautiful designs and more a case of getting ideas down, whilst keeping the the problem statement and persona in mind.
I knew I wanted my designs to make have the map as the main section of the app. Much like Google Maps and Uber have the map as the main focus and everything else revolves around that feature.
After the weekend my team and I all jumped on Zoom and shared what we had produced. This is very insightful because it again gives us a moment to explain our ideas, visually. Are we all on the same page? Do we have the same vision for the app? Are there any standout features that we missed?
User Flow — (Like water 🌊)
Simultaneously to the concept testing we started to work out the User Flow of the app.
A User Flow is a simple path to complete a task. For example: You open the app, You precede through the Onboarding page, You click the button at the bottom, You are now on the Homepage, You click the Menu tab….
At each point in the users journey through the app they are presented with either a Display, a Decision or an Action.
We can use this representation to better understand how we might begin to design the Prototype and the Information Architecture of the app. We can ask ourselves “What is important?” “Do we need to give the user confidence and reasuurance at this stage?” “What additional information will they need to accomplish this task?” …. “What barriers might they face?”
Its all about asking yourself questions and putting yourself in the users shoes. Being empathetic helps tremendously.
Prototype & Userbility Testing…We are almost finished!!
At this point in the project we were all working on different parts of the project as we needed to not only finish the prototype but also test it on users and following their feedback make adjustments. This is called Usability testing.
I focused mostly on the prototype as my Figma skills were slightly better and we could screen share over Zoom so the rest of the team could help make decisions while I made the amendments.
Bellow I have attached one example of this process. We found that users were confused by some terminology, such as ‘ETA’. So we changed it to clear action based terms, ‘Farmers truck OPEN’
Testers of the app were also confused by the information provided when you click on the truck icon itself. They couldn't understand what, for instance, the L,O,S meant (Local, Organinc, Seasonal). So we made sure to explain that with an information icon. They also expressed a desire to know how much phyiscal produce would be available still in the truck when it arrived in their neighbourhood. We added a live counter feature, that would show in real time the quantity or weight of food products left. Highlighted in colours from yellow (lots) to red (low).
I really enjoyed this process of refining the app following critical feedback from our users. Its such a fast but amazingly insightful process.
Attached bellow is the the finished, Low Fi prototype. I emphasized low fi because this is suppose to look rough! It is a functional design that we can easily adjust without getting caught up on colour, typography, graphics, padding etc. We keep it black and white for this reason. The user just needs to be able to navigate the app and be able to complete a single user flow.
Later on this prototype would become Mid and Hi fidelity, depending on resources, budget and time. Given that we had a little over a week to complete the whole project we were happy enough with the Low Fi 😍
👇
Next Steps
If we had extra time or if the product was to be launched for real there are a few things we would like to do or consider:
- Adding more truck icons / markets to the app. Currently you see only the single truck, with leads you to believe that there is only one market happening at any given time. The actual concept was that there would be multiple trucks running across the city in different neighbourhood and at different times of the week. We began thinking deeper into this. When would be the most optimal time for the market to drive around? If it was at 12:00 Noon might we miss out on everyone who at their place of work? Do we include weekends/evenings? How long would the market be open from/until? These are all questions we would need to go back and research, through the exact same process we begun, using quantitative and qualitative analysis.
- Do we also add Meat and Diary to the trucks? Currently the brief was to bring local and seasonal foods to the public. As a team we decided that that meant Fruit and Vegetables, but that could be subjective. By leaving out meat and diary produce we loose a large quantity of our customers.
- We would like to also add an FAQ tab in the menu. Answering peoples general questions such as, “What shall i look out for, what does the market look like!?” “Can I pay with cash or debit card?
- We also would love to add a way to categories what the truck has to offer. So simple filters / sliders / search bars to allow users to refine quickly through the list of available foods.
Conclusion and wrap up 🤩
Firstly thank you for getting this far in my post! You deserve a medal. I wanted to make this post comprehensive. It contains a lot of information but it also shows everything I learnt during just one week of the Ironhack Bootcamp. We were thrown in the deep end, not knowing anyone who you would work with prior to the challenge, not knowing the methodology and concepts and not being totally a master at the tools, but we did it!
I am genuinely proud of my team and the hard work and extra hours everyone put in to get the project finished and also presented to the rest of the class. So thank you Vivian Takahashi Cardoso Alina Aleksandrovna & Antonio Gonima
YOU GUYS ROCK!!! What a bloody incredible team we were!
As one of my TA’s mentioned in my feedback 😜 If you want to comment, clap, or even consider following me! That would be incredible!
P.s
(You can see attached bellow the logo and name of the app we made)
