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?
1. Getting to know the user with data.
In order to get a better understanding of the user, we did a survey on 52 people who live in Île-de-France, the majority is young employees or students aged between 20–35 years old. 94% of them go to nearby supermarket, 42% of the interviewees go grocery shopping once a week and 89% of the case by foot.
Almost 88.5% of them go grocery shopping by foot and only 19.2% go shopping by public transportation or by car.
When we start to ask about their shopping preferences, most participants think organic food as healthy (61.5%) and expensive (73.1%). And also the packagings are an issue for the environment.
When we asked them to evaluate their environmental impacts when buying products, 71.2% are interested in evaluating the environmental impact of the products they consume but don’t know how.
In the meantime, we also have interviewed 5 persons to know what their insights on food sustainability.
Affinity Diagram
According to the insights we obtained from the interviews, we displayed them on post-its and then sorted them into related groups and finally created an Affinity Diagram. This helps us physically see trends and relationships in data.
The top 3 insights are “price is the main concern when buying food”, “shops by foot”, “seasonal food is important”.
HMW statement
We also came up with some HMW statements to help us find opportunities, after dot voting here are the winners :
- How Might We make seasonal products easily accessible at foot distance?
- How Might We make local seasonal food more affordable without jeopardising quality?
- How Might We help consumers be more informed about local, organic and seasonal food?
Empathy Map
In order to gain a deeper insights into our users’, we created this empathy map. This helps to outline aspects of the users’ internal experience so we can know better what are their pains & gains.
2. Defining their problems.
User Personas
To summarise user research and to remind us of who the user is, we created a user personas - Manon Dupont, a healthy-conscious-creative designer who lives in Paris. According to her, ‘I want to live in a world where everyone have access to sustainable food.’ Despite she wants to eat more healthy and she’s a conscious consumer who respects the planet, she still feels that organic food is too expensive and the packaging is not always environmentally-friendly. Also it’s difficult and even impossible to be informed about seasonal products in any kind of stores.
User journey map
We then created a user journey map to visually see the process of Manon shop for organic food as a journey and focused on areas we should work on.
Problem statement
Young health-conscious people with busy work schedules need a way to find affordable organic food from nearby local producers because they don’t have a lot of free time and they have limited budgets.
Hypothesis statement
We believe that exposing local producers and their products to young health-conscious people will achieve our goal of increasing accessibility to local sustainable food. We will know we are right when local producers increase their sales by 10% in the next quarter.
3. Ideation.
After we came up with the problem statement & hypothesis statement, it’s getting more and more clear to our mind what solutions could be to help our users. We did a 2 mins brainstorm on the viable solutions and here’s the chosen one:
An app that connects local producers with buyers and delivers organic food baskets at people’s home / work.
4. Prototypes.
Based on our ideation, we then started to do the prototypes. Each of us has drew some lo-fi sketches and then we voted for the top ideas. Here’s a simple user flow showing nearly all the key features of this app.
We then created an interactive prototype on Marvel for user testing. We conducted 5 user testings and we received some really interesting feedbacks. On the concept testing side, they are afraid of buying food from the internet (not being able to choose fruits/vegetables personally or receiving them in a bad state). Also there should be more detail on the shared shipping option.
On the usability testing side, there’re more insights such as :
Allow users to go back to previous pages (place the “back” arrow properly).
Be able to add/remove items from the checkout page.
Clearer icons in the navbar (highlight them properly).
“What does the burger menu do?”
Give more importance to the environmental score.
Include Nutritional Facts on each product in the basket.
5. Takeaways & next steps…
Personally I find it’s really inspiring to collaborate with other designers to-be. We can learn a lot from each other and we take advantage from our backgrounds. Also it’s very important to conduct the first steps of the User Research with more participants in order to gather more reliable information. We only received 52 responses for the survey which is not quite enough to get accurate insights of certain archetype of users.
And it is important to have more time to properly develop each step of the Design Thinking process to come up with a valuable concept and be able to test it.
For the next steps, we have to validate & properly shape the concept to attend an actual need. Also we’ll create a mid-fidelity prototype and test it. Once validated, create a high-fidelity wireframe.
