Improving the access and affordability of local produced food is achievable.
When living in a city, it’s very hard to find organic and locally produced food at affordable prices. Sometimes, there’s issues even sourcing the origin of the products to check their sustainability.
We all have seen this areas on supermarkets where all the green stamps are gathered: Bio, Organic, Fair trade signs are followed by unexpectedly high prices, most of them unaffordable for the typical user of the supermarket. On the other hand, there aren’t enough local markets on cities where a citizen can do their groceries knowing the products are sustainable and locally produced. Those are some of the problems Anna faces everyday.
Anna is an independent person living in UK, who works as freelance artist. They’re busy most part of the day and finds very hard to find time to look for sustainable stores even though they’d be happy to do their groceries there. They don’t mind spending a bit more money on the food because they know the quality will be better and they’ll also be supporting the community and local producers.
So… how can we help Anna?
Let’s listen what people thinks about sustainable food
Before jumping to solutions, we wanted to empathize with people. See what they are their problems when looking for sustainable food, why do they choose other products, and how they feel about their grocery choices.
Secondary research
After conducting some research, we found important information about food sustainability, which we. clustered into 4 groups: Awareness, branding, representation and price.
Quantitative research
We performed several interviews, and it was easy to see people had very similar thoughts about food sustainability.
Qualitative Research
Now that we know more about the market, we prepared an interview script to find people motivations and feels about finding an purchasing sustainable food.
We had 5 volunteers who kindly agreed to answer to our questions. They gave us amazing insights when it comes to buy local, sustainable products.
Here are some quotes from them:
Identifying our user persona
Now that we have our interviewers’ opinions on sustainable food and local producers, it’s the perfect time to gather all together into an user persona.
Following our secondary research findings, we got all the answers from the user interviews split into 4 big groups: price, representation, branding and awareness.
- Price: everything related to pricing of products, affordability of sustainable products vs non sustainable ones.
- Representation: visibility and availability of sustainable products on the general market and user expectations about them
- Branding: everything related to market choices on sustainable food: for example, labeling and showcasing products on supermarkets
- Awareness: General knowledge about sustainable food and actions taken by users over this information.
The most concerning areas from those 4 groups where definitely the lack of access to sustainable food and also the lack of time form users to research for local producers and stores selling organic products.
Do you remember Anna? They think about this constantly, and they would love some tool to help them find affordable, sustainable food nearby.
Let me present them:
We wanted to know them better. We asked Anna about their day to day life, and how do they plan their groceries shopping. This would help us understand the problem we were facing and start ideating solutions.
Problem statement
Anna need a way to access sustainable products at affordable prices because supermarkets offer overpriced options and local products are not always visible to the customers.
Hypothesis statement
We believe that showing Anna where the nearest stores with sustainable food are, and allowing them to purchase online and have their purchase home delivered would help them feel better about the quality of the food they’re purchasing and also would increase the support to the local community and the producers form the area.
How can we achieve this?
Ideation Time
It’s our moment to find solutions: We now now Anna’s struggles and we can find a way to help her.
There was a lot of ideas to help Anna, from an app with information about a sustainable life to a scan who could help them find the origin of a product and its sustainability. But we went for an app to find stores with organic and local products.
After placing all our ideas on an effort-impact matrix, we knew exactly what to do!
This analysis made us realize where to start: we were going to create an app which had, on MVP, the following main features:
- Map showing stores nearby
- List of stores with basic information such as name, opening hours, location
- Store’s page where they can sell their products
- Online purchase + delivery options
Let’s see how this could look…
Having all those ideas visualized was a real challenge. We first did a user flow to see what would the steps and screens needed to complete the task of purchasing products from a store.
The second step was to sketch the flow as a low-fi and to do a first round of iteration on things we realized that didn’t work well before conducting tests on users. We optimized some screens and created a mid-fi prototype to show to users and test the usability of our design. You can play with the prototype following this link.
Testing with users
Showtime is here! The first prototype is ready and we need to test it out with real users.
Our script
We wanted to see how our users interact with the app, and for that, we asked them to purchase a couple of bottles of fresh milk from the North Farm and have them home delivered. After completing this task, we asked them about glows and grows of the app: what did they love, what did they miss and what were their general feelings while using the app.
We discovered some flaws on the design, which we solved with a second round of iteration.
What to do next?
If we want to deliver a complete solution for Anna, we would:
- Test the second iteration with new users
- Iterate with the feedback received
- Test again
- Start creating a brand and style guide
- Create a High Fidelity prototype
- More testing
- Design a final UI and UX and develop the product
For the scope of this project form Ironhack Design Bootcamp, our team stopped here, but it would have been interesting to see where does this ideas would have ended up!
Key learnings
Solving wicked problems always gives some interesting insights about teamwork, users and the design process.
Working with Yulia, Dorottya and Gaia was an amazing experience and I would like to pause for a moment to thank them for their hard work.
My top 3 key learnings were:
- It’s easy to loose focus on the problem to solve and which goals we were trying to achieve. It’s good to go back to frequently go back the problem statement to not loose sight of the issue you’re tackling.
- When brainstorming, it’s pretty normal to fall into realistic ideas. Be brave! Think out of the box! The most interesting and innovative ideas often come from there.
- Users have their own behaviour patterns, learnt from using other apps on a daily basis. Using those patterns on our favor when designing is key for a good user experience.
Main takeaways
- Research taught us that users are interesting in buying local, organic food and eat in a more sustainable way, but prices and inaccessibility is a barrier for them.
- Our users stated that they strongly disagree with the use of unnecessary wrapping, and the abusive use of plastic.
- Learning from users led us to creating an app with 3 features which were very welcomed: store finder (explore tool), store page and online purchase.
- Early testing helped us detecting flaws on the design and iterate on them to make a better product.
Thank you for reading! Any feedback will be appreciated ❤️
Feel free to join my design journey by hitting the follow button.
