Wicked Problem — Food Sustainability
1st case study of Ironhack’s UX/UI Design bootcamp
Yay, I have survived the first week of Ironhack — Paris bootcamp in UX/UI Design. And now, it’s time to present the first case study. See my last prework exercise here.
Our class was divided into smaller teams, and each team was assigned a different type of a wicked problem. The challenge of our team (Dafne L., Albane Casalta, and JING.C) was on the subject of Food Sustainability.
Here’s the challenge :
In the last decades, there has been a rise in consciousness on the importance of good nutrition and the responsibility that individuals have to provide themselves with good food. Organic food is not accessible to everyone, being restricted to those who can actually afford it.
Supermarket chains and other big companies benefit from the organic food market and conscious customers, but don’t actually solve the situation — they just make the gap and the impact bigger with unsustainable models. How Might We help communities access the seasonal produce of their region, fueling fair and honest relationships between producers and customers while ensuring food safety for all?
So, how did we go about solving this problem? Before I go into our Design Thinking approach, it’s important to understand what is a Wicked Problem ? Simply put it, it’s a large complicated problem that is difficult to solve. Wicked Problems are complex issues, they are difficult to define, and to solve them requires a deep understanding of the stakeholders involved. The best way to solve these types of problems is through an innovative approach provided by design thinking.
So, then what is Design Thinking ? Design thinking is a 5-Step Process that teams use to understand users needs, challenge their assumptions, redefine their problems, and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.
Stage 1 : Empathize - Research User Needs
Because human-centered design is part of the innovative thinking approach, building a deep empathy with the people you are designing for is a first step in solving such a complex problem. This stage is all about User Research so that design teams can learn and understand users’ experiences, motivations, and problems.
But before we could empathize with our users, we had to define them first. And since this is an Ironhack’s Paris design bootcamp, and most of us live there, we wanted to focus on Paris and its region of Île-de-France.
Although there are many different ways to get accurate user insights, Surveys is what user researchers primarily use. Why? They are quick and inexpensive, and allow researchers to find patterns in user attitudes. They are also useful when deciding which problems to focus on as a design team.
We started with the Lean Survey Canvas, a useful methodology that helps design teams quickly create short surveys in a collaborative manner.
Then, we’ve created the actual survey using Google Forms and sent it to users.
In total, we’ve collected 52 responses, which was very good considering our time constraints. But most importantly, we’ve captured a lot of information about our users and their habits. For example, we found out that the majority of our users go grocery shopping once a week, shop by foot at the supermarket, and mostly consider quality and price when purchasing food. Here’s a sample of some of the responses:
After we’ve collected quantitative data, we turned our attention to qualitative data. We’ve conducted 5 interviews that allowed us to further explore our survey questions and its findings. Below are some quotes from the user interviews:
We were now ready to create the Affinity Diagram, which a great method to help a team make sense of all the information that was collected from the surveys, interviews, and brainstorming sessions and organize them into groups or themes based on their relationships.
After we’ve grouped and organized all this information, we voted on the best ideas. Then, based on our winners, we’ve written “How Might We” statements. These HMW statements allowed us to reframe the insights into opportunity areas. We then voted again on the best statements.
Once the User Research phase is complete, the data can be compiled and organized using Empathy Maps. This tool helps the team synthesize the observations, and draw out unexpected insights about users’ needs. It allows the team to sum up learnings from the engagements with the people through surveys and interviews.
The next step on our journey was to create a User Persona. Empathy maps are very helpful tools when creating user personas because both ‘gains and pains’ of our users are clearly defined at this point. So, what are user personas? They are fictional representations of ideal customers based on the user research. Creating these personas helps the designers to understand users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals. Below is our team’s user persona.
The next phase of our project was to create a User Journey Map, which is one of the mapping techniques that helps a team visualize the process a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. It’s a graphic interpretation of the overall story from an individual’s perspective. User journey maps are very useful because they reveal typical customer experiences over time and help designer teams identify points in the journey that could become opportunities.
Stage 2: Define — State your Users’ Needs & Problems
The second stage of the design thinking process is about converging our findings from Stage 1. Our observations were analyzed and the core issues identified giving us a clear idea which problem to solve for the user. We then shaped this into an actionable Problem Statement, which is a clear and concise description of what we needed to focus on and solve as a team.
After we’ve written our problem statement, it was time to make some assumptions, a design hypothesis. A Hypothesis Statement is a prediction for what the design team thinks will happen if it pursues a certain type of action to resolve a problem. These predictions can be tested and validated. Design teams are allowed to create as many assumptions as they wish. We’ve decided to write two.
Stage 3: Ideate — Challenge Assumptions & Create Ideas
The next step in the design thinking process is Ideation, which is a creative process where designers generate ideas through Brainstorming or other tools. Our goal was to produce as many ideas as possible to address our problem statement. The main question the ideation session tries to answer is :
How do I turn my learnings into an opportunity for design?
After generating some good ideas, we voted on the best ones. Based on our votes, we decided to create an app that will connect local organic food producers directly to buyers by delivering fresh food baskets at home or at work.
Stage 4: Prototype — Start to Create Solutions
This is an experimental stage where a model is created to validate the idea from the previous stage. The aim here is to create quick and inexpensive models through a process called Paper Prototyping. It’s a process where design teams create paper representations of digital products, Concept Sketches. Why are these sketches so important? Because they give designers a starting point and freedom to experiment.
We began by having each person draw his/her own sketch. It was a 5 min exercise. We then compared our sketches, explained them, and voted on the best ones.
Since we liked them all equally, we decided to incorporate all the elements into our final concept sketch.
Stage 5: Test— Try Your Solutions Out
This was the time to test our prototype. We’ve tested it with 5 people and here are the user insights that we’ve got.
Learnings
Our key learnings from the first week’s challenge at Ironhack’s Paris UX/UI Design bootcamp were:
- Collaboration is the key to success. We can learn a lot from each other by working together towards a unified goal.
- The User Research phase is extremely important, and the more participants, the better the solutions will be, and ultimately the prototypes.
- It’s very important to have a sufficient time to develop each concept properly.
Next Steps
The next step is to continue to validate our prototype to see if it can attend to users’ actual needs. Then, create mid-fidelity prototypes and test them.
