Let them eat veggies — Connecting urbanites with local, seasonal food 🌱
The first challenge of my Ironhack journey.
TLDR; Education, information with context and positive reinforcement is the answer. See low-fi prototype.
The brief
How might we help people access local seasonal produce, while also fostering fair and honest relationships between producers and customers?
Our first step as a group was to interrogate the brief and unpack all the possible interpretations. We unpacked this using Miro, starting by capturing keywords and identifying possible stakeholders.
Our initial keywords included;
- Organic farming
- Access
- Fairtrade
- transparency
- traceability
- circular food systems
- awareness
- knowledge
- Education
- CO2 impact
- Affordability
- Regional
Assumptions
We were careful to keep our conversations on brief. We made the assumption that local, seasonal food is a sustainable option but we wanted to make sure we would not begin to examine areas including sustainable food in general, fairtrade and low water consuming items.
After putting together our keywords, consciously avoided solutions-based thinking to avoid biases in the solutions. Coming from an arena of 1:1 client work in my own business, where I am looked to for all the solutions, it was a great challenge to actively stop myself from jumping to solutions.
Secondary research
We hit google, searching for context on the problem we had been given. Food sustainability is a subject with a huge impact and the research around it reflected that.
The few key points we found of interest;
“Globally, 85 percent of people indicate that they have shifted their purchase behavior towards being more sustainable in the past five years — however, we observe meaningful generational differences in attitude. When looking at both Baby Boomers and Generation X, 24 percent across each have significantly changed their behavior towards being more sustainable — this figure climbs to 32 percent for Millennials.”
— The Global Sustainability Study 2021, Simon-Kucher & Partners
The global picture was interesting and the European insights further highlighted the importance of LSP to consumers and European governing bodies.
According to EU polling, nearly one in two Europeans believes that eating seasonal and local food is part of a healthy, sustainable diet. Creating shorter food chains to reduce food miles and strengthen local food systems is also among the objectives of the European Commission’s Farm to Fork Strategy and contributes to delivering the European Green Deal.
— Cutting the distance from farm to fork 2021, European Commision
Primary research
We gathered goals for our interviews, as we considered hypotheses for possible barriers to ‘local sustainable food’ and ‘fair and honest relationships with producers’’ for consumers. Our goals were to learn;
- What motivates people to buy local and seasonal?
- Why do people care about local and seasonal produce?
- What local and seasonal means to different people?
- What are the barriers to getting local and seasonal (buyers)?
- Where do people buy? Online, shop next door, community, cooperative. Monthly subscription to boxes
- What impacts that people aim to have or wish to have?
Our main focus was finding motivations, challenges, unmet needs
As we talked, we also generated questions for our consumers that would support us in achieving the information-seeking goals. Simultaneously we were recording assumptions and formulating hypotheses. Naturally, our conversation led to the other stakeholders and we were intent on interviewing a farmer/producer and a shop owner.
Why interview a shop owner when the question clearly states ‘relationships between producers and customers’?
Customers + Information + Shops + Local producers = Accessible and sustainable
We hypothesised that consumers would find the lack of geographic accessibility to local, seasonal produce (LSP) a barrier to connecting with local producers. Smaller, usually independent shops, have the connections, infrastructure, networks and space to facilitate the transport of items to customers, especially in built-up urban areas. We theorised, that if this existing network could be leveraged, whilst for example improving information accessible to consumers about the producers, their farms and seasonal produce, then we could improve these relationships.
Primary research → User interviews
Time to test our assumptions and open our minds to the insights of our interviewees. Our interviewees were all male, working full time, between the ages of 23 and 40. In all truth, this demographic was ordained by access rather than choice however having such a focused demographic made our conclusions more solid.
Our questions were based on our knowledge goals and included;
Warm up Qs
- Where do you live?
This allowed us to learn if they were urban or rural based, which may influence their answers when it comes to access to locally grown produce and also the LSP in their area. - Who do you live with?
To understand if their habits were changed depending on household size. - How old are you?
General demographics so we can understand the segment we are working with. - How often did you go to the shops in the last two weeks?
- Where do you buy your fresh produce, including fruit and vegetables?
Core Qs
- Where do you shop for fresh groceries?
Why?
Establishing current buying patterns of LSP — by digging in we also found people's common motivators. - What criteria do you pay attention to when choosing a grocery store? Why?
- What criteria do you pay attention to when choosing fresh produce? Why?
- What do local food and seasonal food mean to you? Why?
- Which seasonal products do you know?
Where did you learn this? - Do you buy local seasonal produce?
No? Why not, barriers? Yes? Why? - In an ideal world, where would you buy local and seasonal produce from?
- What are the positive impacts of buying local and seasonal produce?
Zoom interviews, five participants, three roles, and one goal.
Our interviews were semi-structured, held on zoom and lasted 30–45 mins each. After an initial test interview, we found a few questions that needed refining to make sure we were not getting repeated answers. This included Qs about criteria for choosing shops versus food produce and why people shop LSP versus what their ideal outcome would be. This allowed time for more ‘Why?’ follow-ups for deeper questioning and exploration of tangents. Why, why, why, why = Insights!
Limitations of our interviews
- It was a very small sample because of the time allowed
- The sample was made up of one single demographic. Before we began we had discussed interviewing a wide base including working parents, older people, different genders and people with different levels of time and disposable income (assumed barriers to LSP). However, we rejected this as we did not have time to interview multiple people in each potential user profile.
- We interviewed users on Zoom, so small body language indicators may have been missed.
Primary research → Interview response refinement
Taking our interview feedback and distilling it into a user persona was a multi-step process that we covered on Day 3. I really enjoyed transforming interview notes into an affinity diagram, making themes out of our research and the feeling of getting closer to the crux of our problem and in turn the solution.
It was a messy process, generating a lot of conversation in our team and we grouped, regrouped and moved our nearly 30 quotes about to create themes and super themes
Once tidied up, this is what we arrived at; A clear structured summary of our user interviews, organised by the natural relationships between them.
We carried out a silent dot vote, leaning into our personal passions to decide which pain point we wanted to pursue. It was clear we were all interested in exploring the environmental and human impacts involved in the user-buying decision-making process.
From this, we developed an empathy map. The main focus points were that he sees food labels and finds it hard to quantify the information there. He feels peer pressure, having friends around him working hard to try and cut their carbon footprint. Our user is saying he is trying but life is busy and the local veggies he is after are hard to access. Finally, what does he do? Feels the pressure and guilt of being aware enough to know he should do better but not enough to know how to!
From this our empathy map, we got specific, defining our user persona. Meet Overwhelmed Oliver…
The main points were that he is trying to gauge his buying impacts and wants to be able to compare items in terms he can quantify. Next, he needs guidance and info to do these things and seeks tasty, good-quality veggies. He is currently frustrated at his lack of knowledge about the contributing factors of his produce purchases to his carbon footprint.
User journey
The user journey helped us translate our research and understanding of our user's needs into the scenario in which our core problem lay. We created a three-day scenario which sees our user, Oliver, navigating the preparation, selection, purchase and reflection of his weekly shop.
The key stages are laid out below;
- His week
- Preparation
- Purchase process
- Use of produce
- Reflection
The majority of the thoughts are direct quotes from our qualitative primary research user interviews. The main pain area we identified was laid out clearly through the emotional journey of the user as they follow the task.
He moves from overwhelm and has a sense of hopelessness when planning his weekly shop. Preparation for his shop involves trying to find out what is seasonal, maybe searching for recipes and getting more confused along the way. Then he knuckles down once in the store and compares different items but still feels confused by all the labels. Decision overwhelm!
The final piece of the defining stage was to write the crux, the distilled and defined problem our user is facing, the solution to which would have the best outcome and be the answer to our brief. No pressure!
Ideation
With context on our brief, a clear understanding of our user and his frustrations and a well-summarised problem to solve, we moved into ideation. There were some key themes that arose, around education and convenience that answered our problem statement.
Prototype → Test
From there, we developed our first low-fi prototype. Feedback was positive especially about the use of positive feedback and different features including maps of local stores and a resource area for recipes. Improvements were identified in our navigation and we added a quick access bar, removed some options from our pop-up hamburger menu and reordered the menu to aid in users' exploration of key features.
Another great feature we added was a gamified leaderboard allowing users to compare their carbon footprint from produce purchases with peers or others in the community. This, plus a lot of positive feedback and stats about buying habits (All tracked through a shopping list feature) would allow people to see the impact of their more informed choices.
The main function of the app was to allow users to scan in-store items, or search by item and origin, to receive instant insights into an item's carbon footprint. A non-digital asset was ideated, a sign with a scalable QR code, present in the supermarket at the users main point of confusion.
Key features of the app
- Scan/search function to quickly learn about the environmental impact of different items, with the information presented in easy-to-digest infographics
- Shopping list, which suggests alternatives to items that may have a larger impact and have local, seasonal replacements growing in your region
- A map function to search for stores nearby that are specialists in different items EG Local produce, have a wide variety of products or are hosting events about food sustainability
- Veggie of the week page (most popular page in user testing!) informing users about a local produce item that is seasonal in their area
- On sign-up, users can select an impact area they would like to learn more about and track. Options included reducing emissions, funding local farmers and reducing packaging (key impact areas from user testing).
- Resources area with recipes and ‘farmer stories’ aka article-style insights into the farming communities in the user's country.
Next Steps
The next steps for this project would be to continue refining the lo-fi prototype through user testing with a minimum of ten early adopter users. Building out more gamified features like a quiz about seasonal produce knowledge and adding more recipes and resources would also be a goal.
Limitations
We were limited in our time during this project as it was for a fixed brief.
Learnings
The process lead us to new concepts and deep thinking made the end result what it is. We had a lot of features and the user testing helped the logic and flow of the navigation. Finally, seeing the power of positive endorsement/reinforcements in the app with smilies, images, icons, emojis etc. was really appreciated.
Team: Sara Lucía Arbeláez & Eve Seifert ❤
Hope you appreciated the project, do leave your comments below!
