Case study —Bring sustainable food to our table
We have come across a problem of how locally produced food can be brought to the users, who have the knowledge of how their food habits impact the nature and their own body.
Overview
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.
Problem
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?
Empathize
Collecting as much as information about how user currently addresses this problem is the key to find the opportunities.
Quantitative methods such as surveys helps in order to better understand attitudes about current market offerings. We conducted a survey and collected 21 responses.
We have conducted five user interviews as well to get a qualitative perspective of the user.
Define
At this stage, we process and synthesize the findings in order to form a user point of view. We define the user to whom, we are designing for and set of needs the solution should fulfill. We defined the problems to address and created affinity diagram.
This helped to cluster findings and physically see trends and relationships in data.
We noticed,
- People want to buy what is more convenient, even if they believe in sustainability.
- People look up for a fair price.
- Even in supermarkets, it is hard to find local products.
We tried to define HMWs and voted. This was to prioritize the problems and focus on the core problems.
Empathy map and Personas
An empathy map is a method used to synthesize rational and sentimental aspects of our users through their situation, acts, feelings and emotions. Empathy map lists what user thinks, hear, see and their pains and goals. Personas on the other hand are fictional characters assembled from the behaviors and motivations of the many actual users we encounter in our research.
We created a primary persona incorporating the user behavior from our user research.
As a next step, we visualized user engagements with story boards and user journey maps. These techniques summarizes how user does his/her goals in current scenario. For instance, user journey maps establish stages in a timeline and then add context, thoughts, and emotions.
The above steps led us to define the problem statements and hypothesis of how a kind of solution could solve the problem.
“The app is designed to achieve convenience. We have observed that the current situation is not meeting near and easy shopping and variety on products which is causing customers to leave bad feedback and not shop”
Ideation
At this stage, we focus on generating lots and lots of ideas before we select and develop the concepts. Ideation enabled us to see a wider range of possibilities than we have ever considered before and uncover unexpected opportunities of innovation.
We followed the tool called crazy 8’s. Here team has to come up with 6–8 ideas in 8 minutes.
The team would then discuss over the ideas and brainstorm, finally votes for the best solution to go with.
“CHANCES ARE THAT… IF YOU HAVE GONE THROUGH ALL POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS, YOU’VE FOUND THE GOOD ONE!”
We finally arrived at creating an online delivery app for fresh sustainable products, which can solve the problem of convenience.
Concept Testing
Concept Testing is the process of using qualitative or quantitative methods to evaluate consumer acceptance of a new product idea prior to the introduction of a product to the market. We use low -fi wireframes to test our solution in Maze.
Learnings & Next steps
As a new designer, first, I felt its quite repetitive while following the process. But going on, I learned the significance of each steps.
It is important to prioritize the information. At the end we got a lot of information to create the solutions and also to look at the future with new features. We learned how to separate and analyze the data to create assumptions and take decisions based on what we learn about our user and targets.
We consider
- Expand our solution to bring the farmers closer (creating food boxes, subscriptions and making the see the added value of using our app)
- To create more personas and fill the gap of not knowing the perspectives of producers, and iterate the process.
Finally, I’ve realized that all intuitive designs that I use are the result of extraordinary commitment and countless hours of research.
