UX/UI Case Study • Food Sustainability
Our first week assignment at Ironhack Paris was to work on a group project focused on user-centered design in order to help solve wicked problems.
Our group was composed of Bianca, Célia, Naima and I. You’ll also be able to find them on Medium, don’t hesitate to have a look at their case studies that will offer another perspective of our common project!
The challenge
A brief with several topics was presented to us and we quickly agreed to work on the following one: food sustainability.
We had to solve the following statement: 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?
Discover
First, we looked for food sustainability’s definition to better understand all the aspects that this topic could cover. It validated some of our assumptions but also added some details that we were not aware of.
Then, we conducted a quick market research in order to define the main trends and issues that the world faced in food sustainability. Here are some main trends and issues we found.
- Demographic rise — Global food need will double by 2050
- Public health — Key factor of a healthy population
- Food waste — ⅓ of the global food production is wasted
- Greenhouse gas emissions — One of the 1st responsible
- New habits — Everyone is involved & actions to be taken to change habits
User Research
Now that we had an overview of the market, we had to go deeper and conduct a user research to get quantitative and qualitative data in order to understand users’ habits, needs, motivations, goals and paint points.
To get quantitative data, we created an online survey that covered all the topics we wanted to know more about. The survey is a way to get quantitative data through a large number of people. The results can reveal some main trends according to the panel of respondents.
The results were very interesting. They revealed some big trends related to the respondent’s habits, to what they actually usually do.
Thanks to the survey, we’ve been able to identify which aspects we wanted to know more about to then get qualitative data. In other words, to find out how the users were thinking.
We targeted 5 people to interview in 2 hours. We defined 10 precise questions to ask during interview sessions from general questions to more narrowed ones. The idea was not necessarily to stick to the questions but at least to have a framework. It is crucial to let the flow come but at the same time to guide the interviewees according to our listening and our initial framework.
Synthesis
After the interviews, it was time to review all the feedback and identify the key insights, the motivations, the goals and pain points of the users. Some quotes were very catchy and meaningful.
The affinity diagram is a bottom up technique that has helped us to clarify our insights. It means that we first gathered general insights without any structure and then started to gather the elements into groups that had common points. We used Miro (an online whiteboard tool) to create our affinity diagram. There were also some “loners” that didn’t fit into some groups but we kept them anyway.
In order to move forward and be aligned with the team, we used the dots voting technique to identify the main pain points that stood out for each of us. The idea is to use a few minutes for each member of the team to identify the key insights that are the most meaningful to dive in. Luckily, we didn’t even have to debate, and 3 main pain points were highlighted almost unanimously.
The empathy map canvas helped us to understand more deeply our interviewees by gathering the insights according to the specific questions detailed below.
These are the main insights we selected from the above canvas.
Define
Thanks to this, we started to work on our user persona which is a fictional character built from the behaviors and motivations of the users we interviewed in our research. The persona reflects the user’s needs and helps to give the direction of the product we will design.
The ideas came actually quite naturally with the common insights that we gathered on the empathy map. Paul was born. An environmentally conscious thirty-year-old young adult living in the city of Paris.
The user’s journey map then helped us to understand in a typical situation, what our user persona came to face, such as point points and frustrations. There is always a starting point and it finishes with a goal. The line represents the emotional path of the user, all the encountered feelings during the journey. This is also a way to find opportunities that could be potential future features for the app we would create to answer the needs and solve problems.
“A customer journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. It’s used for understanding and addressing customer needs and pain points”
Nielsen Norman Group
We then had to define a problem statement in order to be able to move towards our concept. The concept should answer our user persona’s paint points and needs. It should be a clear and concise description to solve. The exercise was not very easy at first since we came out with a problem that was too broad. We therefore came back to all our previous user research to clear our mind (persona, interviews, affinity and empathy map).
After that, we defined 3 “How Might We” statements. The purpose is to define at least three statements in order to validate our problem statement.
Then, we defined our hypothesis statement that should answer our problem statement.
It should validate our problem statement after a certain time of use of the built product.
Develop
Now that our problem statement was clear, we started to think about potential features of the future app from the opportunities of the user journey map. We brainstormed about the main features we could develop within our group and came up with the following concept axes:
- Order food before going to the marché
- A kind of “Too good to go” like for local food vendors
- A kind of “Kayak for local markets” (price and food comparator)
- Food delivery from local vendors (where someone picks up all your groceries for you)
According to these axes we used the Crazy 8’s brainstorming tool to turn our ideas into sketches of potential features. Each of us took 8 minutes to sketch 8 features on a piece of paper. We all came up with some common features such as filters, map, list of vendors and price comparator. The purpose is to create volume and come up with as many ideas as possible.
Deliver the prototype
Our solution took into account the 3 following issues.
We defined a happy path which is the best way we consider the user can take to accomplish a specific task. In order to test this specific user flow, we created concept sketches and tested them with the following task: purchase your groceries to pick up at the marché.
We finalised the first low fidelity prototypes of our project and conducted a concept testing with 5 users.
We gathered the main issues and feedback we had from the concept testing. Here are the main issues the users encountered.
The overall idea of the concept was positive, quite clear, especially for users living in big cities. Having digital access to fresh produce stock of the nearest markets was welcomed.
80% of our users had an overall positive experience. We actually reached the the target we set in our hypothesis statement.
At the end of the week of this project, the final challenge was to present our work to the class and teachers. The goal was to gather the main ideas and share them in a short 8-minute-presentation.
What are the next steps?
- Improve features details — Pick-up information, order details, product info, filters, payment, etc
- Create a vendor application side — Order and pick-up management by the vendor
- Implement a delivery system — Give a better accessibility
- Offer suggestions & Tips — Provide tips such as combating food waste or conserving food
Key learnings
Teamwork — It is crucial to get along with your team and adapt to one another.
Open-mindedness — Being curious and open to all ideas while deep-diving into our problem!
User Contribution — The users often noticed things that we did not. Users’ feedback is key and crucial to improve continuously and move forward.
This very first project was quite a challenge, I was impressed to be able to put into practice concepts that I never applied before. We went into project mode from the very first day and the “learn and do right away“ way of learning technique was very efficient. I cannot wait to work on the next projects!
Thanks for reading :)
