Case study: Finding a way to ensure food sustainability for all
By group of 4, our mission was to produce a solution to resolve the following problem :
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?
🔎 SECONDARY RESEARCH
First, we need to do what we call secondary research about this subject. This will help us get an overall idea of what is ‘food sustainability”. One of the issue we need to avoid is to focus on one problem based on our knowledge.
We gathered our findings :
- Define food sustainability : Seasonal eating, Reduce transforme product, Getting informed, Meet producers directly
- Measure food sustainability : SIGA, indicators and European label
- List the challenges : Lack of representativeness, Lack of conceptual clarity, Replication and/or strong cross-correlation amongst indicators, Sensitivity of the aggregated score
- Tools available on the market : AMAP, La ruche qui dit oui, fraisetbio.
🎤 PRIMARY RESEARCH
The first stage of the Design Thinking process involves developing a sense of empathy towards the people you are designing for, to gain insights into what they need, what they want, how they behave, feel, and think, and why they demonstrate such behaviors, feelings, and thoughts when interacting with products in a real-world setting.
We interviewed 4 persons not directly related to food sustainability. What stood up :
They all want to eat better and healthier, while helping local economy without a doubt, but a few things are getting in the way :
- They don’t have all informations available or they don’t know where to go to find them
- If information is provided, trust is not there
- Because of lack of transparency, they are not happy with the offers in supermarket
- Price is obviously a factor in the choices
- Defiance in politics with EU label
- Accessibility of sustainable products
📈 Affinity Diagram
When to use an affinity diagram ?
Best used when you have gathered any type of research and need to synthetisize it in order to turn data into actionable information.
From these ideas, we regroup them in category, we then proceed to a vote (2 voices per person) to elect one or a several groups on which we will focus for the next step of our research :
- Trust (5 votes)
- Lack of information (4 votes)
So the biggest problem we have is that consumers doesn’t trust the label or the information they get from the store or what’s written on the box, but most of the time, they don’t even get the info they want….
We are going to focus only on thoses issues (because trying to resolve everything is the best way to lose yourself and resolve nothing !)
🙎 Users personas
The user persona was developed back in the 90s as a way to gain powerful insights into a product’s target audience and the user’s habits and preferences. User personas are a representation of your app or website’s user base segments. They act as a benchmark for design and teams to work with to create the optimal user experience. It is a fictitious profile based on the type of people who would be the main users of your app.
- Describe demographics, behaviors, and attitudes
- Helpful in brainstorming, communicating, building empathy
- Should reflect user needs that will translate into product decisions
Our great team came up with this :
🚃 User journey Map
A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user actions into a timeline.
The goal for Charlene is to buy sustainable food, her motivations is to improve her health state, lessen her carbon footprint, and boost local Economy.
The blue stars on the graph represents the design opportunities, where there is room for improvements and where we are going to focus on !
📃 Problem Statement
A problem statement is a clear description of the issue which also includes a vision and methods used to make ways into solving the problem. Basically, it’s a clear, concise description of the issues that need to be addressed and it is used to center and focus the team at the very beginning to stay on track.
Charlène, a busy green yogi needs a way to shop local or organic food without wasting her time buying harmful products. She doesn’t trust products coming from supermarkets, needs reliable informations about the products quality and origin that she buys. She wants to feel good about her consuming choices, and feel aligned with her values of protecting the environnement and encourage local economy.
At this point we reached our first week of bootcamp, the second week, we produced and presented a mid-fi wireframe.
🎱 Crazy 8's
Everybody try to come up with 8 different ideas in 8 minutes by a simple drawing
This was particularly fun as you can really express youself and let really crazy ideas solved all your problems in a blink of an eye as there is not restriction.
After a few round of crazy eight, one of the ideas caught our attentions : Tinder for Farmer.
Don’t forget our main problems are : lack of information and trust issues.
We thought connecting directly users and consumers was the right way to go. So we work on the idea to come up with a solution completely new.
➡️ USER FLOW
The user flow lays out the user’s movement through the product, mapping out each and every step the user takes — from entry point right through to the final interaction
The app will be simple : Connect users to producers, and allow them to organise mutualized trip.
📱WIREFRAMES
Finally on the last day of the project, we were able to produce a mid-fi app that we are really proud of !
- On the first screen, you touch on “meet producers”
- Second screen : You pick your favorites food,
- Here is the fun part : You view several producers profile based on your filters and preferences, the producers profile with a photo, and the description of his ethics, how he works, some photo and a description. If your values matches with the producers ethics, and work guideline, you can like his profile.
- Then you will see all the trips organised by the community and would be allow to join, or even create one ! The next step is to get in touch with the person in charge of the trip
🌮 WRAP-UP
To start with such a wide project was pretty overwhelming at first, the whole team felt lost : you can think of a 1000s ideas to help thoses issues.
But as we moved forward, some ideas begin to rise among the others. The possibility to connect consumers directly to producers would be a perfect way to solve trust issues and lack of information.
To give us a very difficult project at first allow us to struggle as we get the method and the logic of how a UX designer should work. You need to act like you know nothing about the subject at first, only to get closer to your problems during the case.
Our team was very efficient and it was really a great experience to work together. I am very satisfied with the solution invented during these intense couple of weeks.
To start with such a difficult subject at first allow us to really grasp the method and the technique to complete a project from start to finish.
Looking forward to project 2 👀… Don’t hesitate to comment !
