| Case study #1 | Wicked problems : Food Sustainability.
The first project I’ve been working on during the IronHack’s bootcamp was about a very interesting topic : food sustainability. We were a group of 3 people to work on this one-week project : Jana, Kübra and I. I won’t tell you more about it right now and I will try, in this article, to share with you the steps of my project, the questions I went through as well as my learnings.
Background.
In the last few decades, people have become more aware of the importance of good nutrition. But organic food is not accessible to everyone, and is often only available to people who can afford it. Supermarket chains and big food corporations benefit more from the rise of the organic food market than the local producers. Instead of fixing the problem, they are harming the environment with unsustainable models.
How Might We help people access local seasonal produce, while also fostering fair and honest relationships between producers and customers ?
First of all, let’s start with the Research phase.
Every UX design project starts with Primary & Secondary Research.
Let’s start with a definition : primary research is information gathered through self-conducted research methods, while secondary research is information gathered from previously conducted studies. Secondary research is usually where most research begins.
After conducting a secondary research on the internet to be more involved in the subject (with more figures, data and information from reliable sources), we have completed our approach with interviews directly conducted with users fitting with our demographics.
Our first interview guide was composed of 7 main questions (with follow-ups), all open-ended, to gather as much information as possible from the interviewees. To listen to the user and to gather information is essential for the whole process of UX design. After a first test on a potential user, we realized that the interview guide needed some improvements to collect even more accurate/relevant information which will be very useful next.
We finally came up with 2 interview guides : one for the users already sensitive to this topic, and one for the others. The aim was to adapt the best in each circumstances to obtain the most valuable information & insights possible.
I share with you some quotes :
“More simplicity will definitely make me buy more products directly from local producers”.
“My last experience was at the supermarket because I missed the Sunday market”.
At this stage, we’re looking for themes & patterns among all the information we gathered from the users. The objective is to analyze & synthesize all the data. Consequently, we started to cluster the elements and name the groups with the appropriate tool called : affinity diagram.
Here is a global overview of how it looks :
Based on the previous steps, here are the insights we get from this :
Now that we have the main insights directly from users, let’s move on to the next step of the process : who exactly is our user ?
The user persona.
Personas are fictional, composite archetypes based on behavior patterns uncovered during the research phase. They are used to set a common understanding of the final user (regarding its demographics, needs, behaviors, attitudes, goals, motivations…).
So, here is our persona, “Conscious Claire” :
She is a 35 years-old women, living in a big stressful city (London). She is very busy and has very little time for everything. She wants to leave a positive environmental footprint, to have an impact but with little effort. She’s frustrated because she wants to do more for sustainability but she doesn’t know how.
Now that we know Conscious Claire better, let’s further empathize with her using the User Journey Map.
The User Journey Map and the HMWs.
This tool allow us to map the experience.
Why ? To help us understand and address our user needs and pain points.
The scenario we chose here was the following one : it’s Monday evening, in summer, and Conscious Claire has to buy strawberries. As she missed the Sunday market, she has to go to the supermarket. At the end of the experiences, even if she completed the task, she feels really bad about the situation which is not aligned with her environmental values.
Mapping the experience, we can clearly identify UX design opportunities (the orange section, and above all, the red section).
The problem statement.
Thanks to all the previous steps, and as design is about solving problems, we are now going to come up with our final problem statement.
After a quick preparation phase (see above), here is our final problem statement :
Once the problem statement phase is completed, let’s continue with the ideation phase.
Ideation.
All the necessary building blocks for our reflection are now in place, so we need to launch a creative process of production, development, and communication of new ideas. This phase is called “ideation”.
The objective? To obtain the best possible ideas which will shape a solution that is all the more appropriate and relevant.
There are many methods to do so, but we used the Crazy 8s and Worst idea for this project as they are complementary.
Here is how ideation looks like :
While we came up with plenty of good ideas (reverse ingeneered or directly coming from the Crazy 8s), the aim is to select the best one(s), which means the one(s) solving in the most appropriate way our user’s problem. This is what we call the feature prioritization.
UserFlow.
Once we proceed we feature prioritization, the next step is to draw the user flow. We will focus on the Happy Path of our user which is like this :
With this user flow, we clearly directly respond to our user’s problem : to quickly and easily localize around them all the organic/local product they’re looking for. The interactive map (+ route in GoogleMap) and the search bar (product search) are our main features.
Now that we have the UserFlow, let’s prototype our solution : an app.
Lo-Fi Wireframing.
The earlier we prototype, the best it is to deceal any issue and avoid expensive errors. Low fidelity wireframing is the way to do so.
That way, with a lo-fi prototype easy to conceive, we will be able to test it with our users and check that our solution is fully responding to our user’s need asap.
Low-fidelity wireframing and prototyping is in tones of grey, just showing the essential and making it understandable, like this :
Concept testing.
Of course, making one lo-fi prototype is not enough : if we don’t test our solution, we don’t learn, so we don’t improve and so we risk to miss our objective of perfectly solving our user’s problem.
Everything now is about iteration.
We have to iterate and amend consenquently the prototype which embodies our solution.
Thanks to concept testing, we’ve been able to collect user feedbacks. That way, we modified the previous version of our app to perfectly match with our user’s need.
Key learnings & next steps.
One of my personnal key learning of this project is that going through a task analysis before doing the userflow can be useful and so avoid wasting time. This way, you will feel more comfortable with the user flow to be drawn and it will probably be more relevant than if it had not been done.
Next steps on this project will be to do the Mid-Fi and then the Hi-Fidelity prototypes, and also to develop the other features of our app to make it fully effective for both our primary and secondary persona.
