How could we make local organic food more affordable and accessible?

A UX design case study

8 min readJul 4, 2022

Meet Gabriella,
A 28 year old marketing intern that loves to eat healthy. She tries to maintain a good balance between meat, vegetables and fruits— and an occasional pizza. She wishes to buy mostly local organic food, but that’s quite a struggle. The majority of organic products are far more expensive than the regular ones. Even worse: Some supermarkets claim to sell ‘organic’ foods, but many labels are misleading and false. On top of that, they earn a huge profit from locally grown food while the producers see little of it due to a big supply chain.
A different option would be to buy organic food at local shops around town, but how many shops does she have to visit to get all the groceries she needs?
It can be quite a challenge to eat healthy. That’s a wicked problem.

How might we help Gabriella?

This calls for a design challenge!

Jacob, Jazmin and me worked as a team to find possible solutions for Gabriella and all the other people wanting to eat healthy — locally produced — organic food. We believe that there is a lot to win in this market. Our challenge was stated as follows:

“How might we help communities access the seasonal produce of their region, fuelling fair and honest relationships between producers and customers while ensuring food safety for all?”

Awesome! To answer this question, we’ll apply design thinking to explore the problem and come up with some innovative solutions. We specifically focussed on the users for this challenge since that was the scope for our Ironhack UX/UI Design bootcamp project.

Let’s start!

Who would like to buy local organic food? And why?

First, we want to empathize with the people who are interested in buying local organic food. We want to learn what their needs and problems are and what their perspective is regarding this topic. Therefore, we did secondary-, quantitative- and qualitative research.

Secondary research:

So how is this market behaving? What are the trends? We wanted to gather some insights about this industry and how it is developing. The following insights stood out:

Buying and selling local organic food is a quickly rising trend.
Close relations between producers and consumers improves community spirit and engages consumers in the production.
Supply chains are faced with big ecological and profitable challenges when it comes to local organic food.

Quantitative research:

Okay, we know a bit more about the market and how it is developing. Now it is time to come up with some good questions to ask the users. We created a Lean Survey Canvas to move fast and goal oriented for creating our survey. Next, we send out these surveys to as many people as possible. Eventually we gathered the following insights:

You can find all the survey results here.

Qualitative research

We learned even more about the market and have gathered some quantitive data. Now we can dive deeper into the problems and motivations of our users. We’ll do this by conducting user interviews.

We found 5 people kindly willing to help us out. They taught us a lot about their motivations and problems when it comes to buying local organic food. To show you an overview of what we learned, we’ve included a couple of important quotes below:

You can find all the interviewees responses here.

How do we define our user and their main problems?

We have done all the research, so now it is time to synthesize the data we gathered. We want to define who our users are and what their main problem is. Let’s start with the users.

Who is our user?

To articulate what we know about our user, we created an Empathy Map.

Next, we want to use our empathy map and research findings to create an archetypical User Persona. Here, we can state goals and characteristics that represent the needs of a larger group of users.
Remember Gabriella from our introduction? Well, ta-da:

What is the main problem?

Hi Gabriella, we now see what your goals and frustrations are. Let’s specify these problems even more by finding common themes and patterns. We can do this by creating an Affinity Diagram.

Aha, we see that the biggest theme is the price followed by accessibility. Next, we want to display this in such a way that we can see in what stages of the user’s journey they encounter these problems. We’ll do this by making a User Journey Map. Below, you can see exactly when these problems occur in the users — or Gabriella’s — journey:

Lastly, we can formulate and define the following:

Problem statement, hypothesis statement and 3 ‘how might we’ questions

Let’s move on and think of some cool ideas that might help Gabriella!

What solutions might help the user?

It’s time think of lot’s of different ideas. We did a brainstorm session of 15 minutes and tried to come up with a lot of varying ideas around 4 main functions that we felt were a must. Next, we gave ourselves 2 dot-stickers for each of these main functions. Then we started to vote for the best ideas:

Here is an overview of the chosen features:

On the search page, showing suggestions of locations that can be filtered on price, distance and items from your shopping list.
On the search page, showing results that include icons of the different types of products available.
On a product page, showing the product’s labels including a clear description.
On a product page, showing prices of the same product in different stores for comparison.
On the recipe page, being able to find recipes for what you already have in stock at home.
On the recipe page, showing suggestions for what is in your shopping list.
On the shopping list page, being able to have a shared list with another user.
On the shopping list page, showing suggestions for what you’ve previously bought and seasonal products.

Let’s visualize these ideas

A picture says more than a thousand words, so let’s sketch these ideas out immediately and see what the users think of it. This is also called Concept Sketching, a way to quickly communicate ideas that’s very cost effective.
It looks like this:

Cool, but now we want to test these ideas with our users to validate if it’s working in the first place. We requested 5 users to perform a couple of tasks, asked them how easy or hard it was and to motivate their answer.
Ultimately, we learned the following:

Very interesting! Let’s iterate our ideas and create a low fidelity prototype.

What might the prototype look like?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings! It’s very effective for communicating ideas and solutions. It saves a lot of time discussing and explaining too!
Let’s see what our low fidelity prototype would look like:

Also check out this video to see it in action:

lo-fi prototype

What’s next?

In order to deliver a fully validated solution for Gabriella and all other users, the following steps should be taken:

Testing with the lo-fi prototype
Iterate design and create a mid-fi design
Testing mid-fi prototype
Create a visual style guide
Iterating design and create a hi-fi design
More testing
Developing

The list above can change based on the testing results of course. Besides that, it would be good to dive even deeper into some topics by doing more quantitive and qualitative research. But I’d recommend doing that in a next phase.

Unfortunately, this is the end of our first project from the Ironhack UX/UI Design bootcamp. Though I hope our project could inspire you to see that there can be solutions for wicked problems. It definitely inspired me!

What have I learned?

First of all, I want to thank Jacob and Jazmin. It was a blast working together with them. During this project I learned a lot. Here is my top learning moments:

Not losing myself into tiny details, but keeping track of time and focus on the main goal.
As an observer and note taker during one user interview, it’s key to also focus on the user’s body language. A user can say they think something works fine, but if they look confused it’s key to point that out and go more in depth with the user about it.
It is essential to create concept sketches before creating low-fidelity screens because you can test — and fail — way quicker and cheaper.
We could’ve brainstormed more in general instead of immediately choosing the 4 main functions. Perhaps we could’ve come up with lot’s of different ideas.

Main takeaways

Here is a quick summary of takeaways from this case study:

Research shows that people are definitely interested in buying local organic food, but that price and inaccessibility are the biggest problems for them.
We see that the user loves seeing and touching the food, but according to the user journey there are a lot of frustrations when going out for groceries.
By learning how the user buys their groceries, we came up with 4 different functionalities that will help the user make it easier to do so: Search, recipes, shopping list and a product scanner.
By testing our ideas as soon as possible, we validated if they actually work. It also meant we iterated our concept sketches and made improvements in the lo-fi design.

Thank you for reading and follow me for more upcoming case studies 😊!
Also, your feedback on this article is much appreciated!

— Robin