Background
Ecology is important. It’s a fact, right? In 2021, most of us are concerned about the state of our planet. From rising sea levels to the collapse of biodiversity, it’s hard not to think about it and feel hopeless.
So during the Covid crisis, many of us rethought the way we consume. In the midst of a pandemic, we collectively felt the need to find a way to live a slower, more peaceful life. A way of life that supports the creatures that inhabit our planet. All of them. In these stressful times, it was important for many of us to reconnect to what matters, to help each other, to improve our health, and more than ever, to impact our society and make a difference through our lifestyle.
But even with these good intentions, the reality can be very different. Many people do not have access to organic and local foods. Many people want to try but feel helpless with all the information out there. Where to find local products? Where to buy local products? Is it really worth it? Can I make a difference, even on my budget?
Challenge
This is where we, a team of 4 UX/UI designers, come in:
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?
Our journey starts here.
— Research
We did some research on the topic first, to know more about the goals and inpacts of local and seasonal food.
As a team, we tried to put all our knowledge of the subject together :
What we already know?
What are our assumptions?
What do we need to learn?
Who are we targeting?
How are we targeting them?
To tackle the problem, we need data. Lots of data. We need to find who our users are, what problems they are facing, what they want, what are their hopes…
The Survey
So we first started with a survey. We filtered it down to the most important and relevant questions we needed to ask, as we wanted to have a clear understanding of our demographic, their habits and their pain points in buying local products.
We asked several questions:
How old are you?
Where do you live?
How many people do you live with?
Where do you buy groceries?
What is your weekly grocery budget?
How often do you buy local and/or seasonal products?
What are your main reasons for buying locally and/or seasonally?
What can discourage you from buying locally and/or seasonally?
All of our questions were multiple choices, to gathered the more precised data as possible.
Here is our findings :
They mostly buy in supermarkets, as it is more convenient. Some of them buy in local markets and organic markets a few times a month.
When asked “how often do you buy local?” most answered weekly.
The main pain point seems to be the price of buying local food. 59,3% of them seem to think it’s more expensive, while 51,9% of them are put off by the idea of traveling too far to do their grocery shopping.
User interviews
The next step for us was to give 5 interviews of minimum 30 minutes long to gather more info after the survey. All the interviews were made on Zoom or in face-to-face.
The questions were pretty much the same as the survey, but we wanted to go in more depth about the interviewees habits and pain points. It was important that we understand how they see buying local products and if they had any misconceptions.
After this process, our assumptions started to appear more clearly.
With the interviews and the survey, a clear demographic was detaching from the other : our primary user is between 25–35 years old, single or in a relationship, lives in a big city or near a big city and has a moderate budget per week for grocery (50 to 150 euros per week).
They are aware of the importance behind buying local and wants their consumption to have a social, ecological & economical impact as well as improving their lifestyle and health at the same time. They want a solution that centralized their needs. They like the concept of supermarkets and finding everything in the same place instead of having to shop at different places, sometimes too far. They also like to buy online and collect their orders at the drive.
An other pain point that came back often during the interviews is the lack of information and knowledge about the subject : where to find local producers ? And how to know what they sell ?
Affinity Diagram
After the interview, we transcribed our results and analyzed our data. We took the quotes and synthethized everything into an affinity diagram.
We made categories and sub-categories to regroup each findings and identify what our main focuses should be.
Finally we each did dot-voting to select the main areas we want to further work on : the accessibility problem and the practical problem.
Interpreting the data
Focusing on the categories we voted for and using the transcripts from our interviews, we started generating “How Might We” statements.
“How Might We” (HMW) statements are short statements that start with the phrase “How might we…” and end with an opportunity.
Every problem is an opportunity for design. By framing your challenge as a How Might We question, you’ll set yourself up for an innovative solution.
- IDEO
Narrowing down our informations, we ended up with three How Might We statements :
How Might We simplify the user experience of buying local food?
How Might We help people find shops or producers near them?
How Might We get farmers to connect with their consumers?
— Define
Empathy Map
An Empathy Map is a kind of canvas which has the purpose of organizing pieces of data. The main goal of an empathy map is to categorize users’ testimonials into attitudinal and behavioral data.
We made our empathy map to help us define users pain points and goals, leaving us with clear infos for the next step : our primary persona.
Primary Persona : Zoé Foucher
Now that we know more about our users and their pain points, it was time to start defining who we will be designing for.
We created a primary persona based on the demographics from our survey and the interviews.
Zoé is a 30 years old graphic designer who lives in Montreuil, near Paris. Like many of us, she is concerned about ecology and the tracability of her food. She wants to buy local to reduce her carbon foot print but she faces difficulty: she doesn’t know where to find local producers, doesn’t want to travel too far for her groceries and waste too much of her free time, or she doesn’t want to have to buy in different shops.
It’s time to create a backstory for Zoé and see what are her struggles in her daily life and how might we help her with our solution.
User Journey Map
We made a user journey map, focusing on the future, to see all the process Zoé has to go through to buy local food and how our product could be useful to her.
Problem & Hypothesis Statement
From all the insights we got during these processes we were able to state our problem:
Young active city residents need a way to find where to quickly buy local products because they don’t have enough information and time in their daily lives.
Wich leads us to our hypothesis statement:
We believe centralizing the purchase of local products for
young active city residents will achieve our goal of making regional
produce accessible.
We will know we are right when the number of second purchases increased by 15% in the next quart.
— Ideate
We started ideating with the Crazy Eight technique. With one paper each, we started drawing 8 ideas in 8 minutes.
— Our Solution
When we gathered and shared all our ideas, we realized that the solution that stood out to all of us was an ecommerce mobile app.
The idea was to have an app where you can find all the local producers near you and buy directly from them. The user can choose to get their order delivered or collect it at a collecting point.
We made a rapid sketch prototype to test our idea:
Concept Testing
Once we had our concept sketches, we tested it with 5 users. We tasked them to find a shop near them and to put items in their cart.
What we learnt:
For all of them, the homescreen was not the one they were expecting to be. They would prefer to start with the geolocation screen rather than the shop homescreen. Once their order is done, they would prefer to go back to the geolocation to make a new search.
The navigation was not clear for most of them. One suggested to have a breadcrumb navigation, to go back to the previous page easily.
Ours testers all wished to have a quick purchase feature, so they won’t have to go on the product details screen each time they want to purchase a product.
Finally, the signin screen was placed at an odd way. With further investigation, we realized that a screen that summarize the card was missing.
— Our Mid-Fi Wireframe
Here is the midfi prototype that we have created taking into consideration the feedback from the testers:
We start immediately with the geolocation screen to find a shop near us.
Then we arrive on the selected shop home screen. We can find a “categories” section, a “special offers” section as well as a “best selling articles from this shop” section.
On the articles screen, the “add to cart” feature has been added so that users can shop quickly for items.
On the product details screen, we can find more infos about the product: it’s origin, a short bio about the producer, where they are located and what other items the shop sells.
We have added a cart screen between the product details screen and the check out screen.
The sign-in screen is located between the shopping cart and the order details, so that you can retrieve your payment information if you are a frequent user, or simply buy in one go if you are an occasional customer.
— Next Steps
Now that we have our mid-fi wireframe, our next steps are going to test it with several users.
We would like to focus more on making screens regrouping the producers with their bio and pictures, an address book to find all the shops and producers favorited and instead of a favorite system for the produce, we would like to transform it to a shopping list.
Finally, we would love to add a calendar of seasonal products.
— What I learned from this challenge
- The biggest challenge to me was to learn to work with a new team. But thankfully, we quickly find a balance and got along really well!
- A good comprehension of the problem is mandatory and spending time to do lots of research on it is important. Do not skip this task!
- There is a lot of amazing tools out there to work as a team. Use them! Figma, Miro, Trello… As soon as you start using those tools, your productivity will increase and working as a team would be much easier.
- Be careful with all the details. Keep track of everything you do and prepare for your presentation as you progress, not at the last minute.
- CO-MMU-NI-CATE with your team!
- Finally, just have fun, trust the process and keep going! You got this!
Thank you for reading!
