Week 1-Ironhack Wicked Problems
Food sustainability
The first week of the UX/UI Design BootCamp of Iron hack started straight away with a design thinking process to make a Low-FI prototype of an app. In a team of 4, we had 3.5 days to present our first project.
The motivation
Our motivation was to emphasize and understand the potential users in their needs to support them buying sustainable food.
The task
At the end of the week, we needed to deliver a prototype for an app to help people access seasonal products in their region. To reach the goal, we went through a design thinking process of empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing the first ideas.
Empathize
Our first step was to empathize with the potential user and we brainstormed who could be potential users, what we want to get to know and what we may be already known about them. Afterwards, we phrased questions for a survey to get quantitative feedback from people who do grocery shopping. We set up a survey with the aim of 30 feedbacks, at the end we had 45 people who gave us information about shopping behaviour. This is a great base to get analyze the current problem for buying sustainable food.
While evaluating the survey we figured out some important points about the users shopping behaviour and what is important for their eagerness to buy products. 71 % of the people go to the standard supermarket, but out of that also 31% go to small local markets and farmers markets. A surprise was that online shopping is not popular at all for our target group. 73% tried already an app for grocery shopping but no one kept on using them, they prefer to go to the market to get their fresh products there. The price determines the purchase but even though it is important for the survey partners to buy healthy local products support the farmers of the region.
To figure out our main points about the target group we created Affinity maps. Out of this process, we figured 3 bullet points as “The customer wants clear and complete information about the product”, “ Organic food is too expensive” and “People might use an app but they don´t because the existing ones are not meeting their expectations”. Out of this, we created also questions as “How might we…” solve the problems for the user.
How might we show all the information about the product visible to the customer?
How might we make local organic food apps more attractive & user friendly?
How might we lower the prices and give users more options to buy organic food?
Additional to this we also made qualitative research. We interviewed 5 ( 1 male 4 female) people between the age of 28–43 years old to get more detailed information and get a look behind the surface. We validated this information of our interviewees in an Empathy Map. We collected the goals, pain points, gains and what they say/hear about the current situation about sustainable food.
Based on the research we created a main User Persona. Our persona is a 30-year-old female from Barcelona living together with her boyfriend. She is working as an architect. Her name is Lily, for her, it is really important to support the local Farmers, to eat healthily, to reduce food waste and to get transparent information about the food she buys. Her current pain about buying sustainable products is that she goes to several markets to get all the things she needs. She cannot easily find all the information about her groceries as well as that the products are quite expensive. She also has the feeling that the customer is not well connected with the farmer and she couldn´t find a suitable app so far to support her shopping process. She wishes that she can access all kinds of foods in one market and that there are more seasonal and local products available. She wishes for a better connection between the farmer and the customer. She would also appreciate it if the local products would be more affordable for everybody.
To understand Lilys needs better, we developed a story of her shopping process. The storyboard is about Lily's journey to the supermarket where she cannot find local carrots, only imported ones from Mexico. But she wants to support the local farmer, therefore she goes to another small local market where she finds the more expensive but Catalan local carrot.
In the following of this, we created a more detailed journey map where we define possible touchpoints of Lily's actions with the app. To understand her current discomfort about the journey we empathized with the process and pointed out her feelings with emojis and a scale line. Her biggest pain point was that her product was not available in the Supermarket and her journey took longer than expected because she went to a second local market. Even though Lily was really happy when she had her local carrot. This helped us to figure out opportunities and insights as saving time for the shopping by showing availability and information of products in an app.
Problem statement and Hypothesis Statement
After this process, we made one last brainstorm to develop our problem and hypothesis statement. For this, we asked questions to ourselves about the product we design, what are the goals and current points are not meeting the user's needs, what eventually could be negative impacts for our users and how can we measure these.
“Our app was designed to provide gathered information about accessibility to local fresh food. We have noticed there is no service fulfilling users needs of buying everything in the same place, lack of it is causing shopping frustration and feeling of guilt caused by not supporting sustainability.
How might we display and operate the information about accessibility to products so that our APP is more successful in terms of downloads and feedback from our clients?”“We believe collecting all necessary information where to buy their products for conscious consumers will solve the problem of lack of access to it. We will know if we were right or wrong with the results of conducted tests.”
Ideating Ideas
After the research and processing insights, we started with the ideation process. With the method of “crazy 8” we developed individual ideas. 2 out of 4 ideas were leading in the same direction of having only one shop to buy all products. We decided to work with these and combine them so that we created our first Low FI prototype.
Low Fi prototype
According to our problem statement, we decided to focus on an app to make the shopping of local products more efficient and give the option to figure out in advance where our users can get all the products they need in one place.
In our first prototype, the user experience starts while choosing the location, afterwards, the user can set some filters and choose which kind of groceries he/she is looking for. Then there is the step to collect the things which need to be bought. Afterwards, there are options to either choose the market directly from the map and jump immediately to the option to navigate to that market. Or the first option gives the choice to click first to “compare shops” where all the products are available. The user can choose which shop is the best option. The last step leads to navigation websites as GoogleMaps, Apple maps or Maps me.
Testing
To get the most out of our product we send it out to get tested. Overall we got good feedback especially about the user flow, which is generally easy to follow and understandable. Some gains for us were to give more information about the Supermarkets and that the 4th slide was a bit confusing about the availability in the supermarkets. Therefore we developed a second prototype.
After the feedback, we marked the shops ( 4th slide) where all products are available, to get to know which markets are giving a shopping possibility. To provide more information we deleted the map on the 5th slide of the app to have the space for adding on information about the market as opening hours and more.
Reflections
Creating the first project of the Bootcamp was indeed intense, but it gave us also the option to learn a lot of new things in a short time and to grow with the process. Even though the time was short we finished the task after we went through the research process. The main struggle was for us to only focus on one problem and not try to solve all the problems at the same time. Our next steps for the app could be to give more information about the products, to focus on a solution to equalize the price of local fresh products with the other options in the market and maybe to add a delivery preference. As well as a rating system about the users experiences to constantly improve the app.
Thank you for reading.
I´m excited to continue with the next project in the second week of Iron Hack Bootcamp. Feel free to leave some comments. ✌️
Also a big thank you to all the interviewees and survey participants.
