Case Study : FOOD SUSTAINABILITY
This was my first UX UI design project as a student in the Bootcamp of Ironhack. This project last for 5 days.
I team up with a group of 5 people that were really nice. Together we choose our subject: Food sustainability. This was the brief: 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?
First, we decide to do some secondary research to know better the subject we were taking. We had many assumptions: people are not buying sustainable food because it’s too expensive, sustainable food was only for rich/cultivated people, sustainable is a term that is not clear, people are heating sustainable/local/seasonal food for their health, is it related to the place people lives: urban vs rural? … We brainstorm and put all of our research and assumptions on a miro file.
1/ Quantitative Research: We put together some questions to make a survey on Google Docs form. We shared it online and got 123 answers.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1JggamCaVlwrSZg3XClttiy8HVs9XKb7zv71CE63s6qA/edit (here the survey)
82% of our respondents were between 18 and 40 years old, 92% lives in cities and 60% of them were employed.
2/Qualitative Research: After having the quantitative research we put together the question we wanted to ask for the user interviews. We conduct 5 user interviews that were answering the questions like those for example: Do you have a (monthly/ weekly) budget for your groceries shopping? Do you buy some sustainable, local, or seasonal food? Do you know what sustainable products are? How frequently do you buy sustainable/local/seasonal products? (etc…)
To use the quantitative research we interview 5 people that were aged between 18 and 40 years old and lived in the cities.
We analyze the result of the interview and using some tools (Affinity Diagram, Empathy map) we define the pain point and our User persona.
3/ User Persona: The user persona is a fictional character that helps to align strategy and goals to a specific user group. The user persona summarises the user research. So here’s Théo, a young eco-friendly citizen. Théo is a motivated Junior Engineer working with Engie in Paris. He got a busy and dynamic schedule. He tries to find some time to protect the environment by eating sustainable food and being mindful of the waste and believes in recycling.
Théo wants to learn more about sustainable products from the packaging and to be able to eat more sustainable food.
4/ Théo Journey map: Then to have a holistic view of the customer experience we make a user journey map of Théo :
Théo plans to invite a friend and cook a great meal for this special moment. As mentioned in our user persona, it is crucial for Théo to have good quality products and to eat sustainably. After work, He plans to go food shopping, he knows what to eat but he doesn’t know where to go.
He had to choose between several markets, but he wants to go near his house and not doing several kilometres to shop.
He reaches a shop and starts looking for the product he wants to eat, he wonders if there is a specific area dedicated to sustainable, local, seasonal products. There isn’t…
He finally finds the vegetable and had to choose between several products. He chose two zucchinis but don’t know how to compare them because there is a lack of information about the two product. He chooses the cheapest and goes to the cash register angry, disappointed, frustrated, and angry.
5/ Problem Statement and Hypothesis statement: We define our problem statement and then our hypothesis statement to have a synthesis of all the research we did to help us be clear of what we are designing.
Problem statement: A citizen needs to access nearby food with clear and credible information provided in their packaging because they want to be reassured that they are correctly purchasing healthy local organic and sustainable food while conserving the environment.
Hypothesis statement: We believe that offering access to credible information provided in their packaging for citizens who want to eat and shop for more sustainable products will achieve reassurance of buying healthy and sustainable food while taking care of the environment. We will know we are right when we see an increase in sales of sustainable products.
6/ How Might We: We brainstorm and choose the 3 following How might we pick the 3 main problems we want to solve:
- How might we help citizens find the nearest market that will provide them with the sustainable product to save time?
- How might we provide citizens with the most credible, transparent/clear information about the product sustainability so he can choose the product he’s looking for?
- How might we give citizens the opportunity to compare multiple sustainable products to buy the best product?
7/ Ideate: Based on our 3 HMW we brainstorm (again) to ideate the features we wanted to have in our mobile app. Then we dot voted and selected 3 features we decide to focus on :
- Getting information about the product
- Getting information about a place to buy sustainable products
- Taking decision between products
Low Fidelity: together we did a low fidelity sketch of all the screen we wanted :
Mid-fidelity: Then we did the prototype on Figma. As we were checking the user flow, we noticed some missing screens and added them.
8/ Usability Testing: In order to have some feedback about our mid-fidelity prototype we decided to conduct some usability tests. We got different types of feedbacks:
- Globally the navigation was easy and clear for users. Validation of user flows and some good points in features
- Pain points in UI, which provides us Suggestions & Ideas For usability improvements (ex : horloge dans map; “SCAN” sous icone; icone indiquant “ma position” sur la map; etc.
- Also, we got relevant suggestions & Ideas related to testers expectations
Therefore we had to do some change to improve our prototype :
9/ Key learnings :
I learn so much from this first project! How to conduct interviews, how to make a user persona than the user journey map! It was really enjoyable and super challenging!
Thanks to my super team : Bibin K Ponnachan Eléonore A. Ümmü Han AndreaA