How we faced to a wicked problem about the food sustainibility

This work was done during my UX/UI Design course at Ironhack with 3 top teammates 🙂

“In the last few decades, people have become more aware of the importance of good nutrition. But organic food is not accessible to everyone, and is often only available to people who can afford it.

Supermarket chains and big food corporations benefit more from the rise of the organic food market than the local producers. Instead of fixing the problem, they are harming the environment with unsustainable models.

How might we help people access local seasonal produce, while also encouraging fair and honest relationship between producers and costumers?”

As a UX/UI Design student, we worked together on the whole project.

However, thanks to my previous professional experience I am used to searching for information. In the context of the project, I turned to national surveys that had been carried out among consumers and farmers which I then synthesised for my team.
I like to organise and have a work organisation within a team to be effective, even efficient. Given the time we were given (7 days), this is one of the aspects I contributed to throughout the project.
The creative part of the ideation and prototyping phase is one of the skills that particularly attracts me. After thinking with my team about the solution, I naturally proposed to make the prototype in low-fi and the user flow.

What are we talking about?

To get a feel for the problem, we first gave ourselves 15 minutes to think about the problem and our understanding of it.
I suggested using the miro tool, which many people already use, to write down and present orally what each of us thought about the problem.

At this stage, we have identified 3 potential problems about the :

• Price : too expensive : local produce is not affordable, understand how to reduce the price of local production
• Information : Difficult to identify what is seasonal or not, understand why this is more expensive, (transportation, materials), local production have no visibility, no price comparison tools
• Accessibility : Supermarket are more accessible (closer and cheaper), they can come from far away

Secondary research

In order to obtain information on the subject, we all carried out research without assigning ourselves a specific theme to the problem. Our aim was to collect a lot of information and then present our research and identify together if there were any common trends.

Some of the information was related to political issues where we as designers can act directly on the issue.
On the other hand, our research highlighted three axes : price, product information and relationship.

In this context, we have drawn up a matrix that highlights the three areas of concern according to our 3 identified problems.

Our CSD matrix bring out the questions we still have as a result of the research and for which we need further information.

Qualitative study

Given the context of the study, a qualitative study was needed to understand how people shop and the problems they face.

Individual interviews

Thus, we decided to carry out 9 interviews (instead of the recommended 5) of 30 to 45 minutes per interview.

We chose to ask them about their buying habits, seasonal products, local products, price, their impact in the following way:

• Intro
  – Age, employment status, marital status, where they live,
  – Who mainly does the food shopping in your household?
• Habits
  – Frequency of purchase, budget,
  – Preferred place(s) of purchase and why?
  – Daily food shopping, Criteria to make their choices
  – Causes most important
  – Aligmment of purchasing habits with their personal values/beliefs
  – Do they pay attention to the products they buy when shopping? If not, why (lack of time, prejudice etc)?
  – What information do they pay attention to when buying a fresh product?
  – What do you think of the information (origins, producers, …) on the products/ or in the shop you buy? What would you like to see?
• Seasonal products
  – Understanding of the concept of seasonal fruit and vegetables and the importance they give to seasonal products
  – But also the proportion of seasonal products in their purchases
• Local production
  – Interest in knowing the ‘story’ of the produce they buy
  – What extent would having more information about the production and producers allow them to buy more local products?
  – Where do the products they buy come from? What prevents them from accessing this information?
  – What are their understanding of the concept of local products? Does it fit into the way they buy?
  – What level of information do they think they have access to as a consumer?
  – If it is important to them to buy local products

We are almost done 🙂

• Price
  – What do they think about the price of local products? How do they explain this price?
  – Do they compare the prices of the fresh products you buy?
  – What do they think of a fresh product at a low price and at high price
  – What do they think of the prices of local products?
  – What leads them to say that a price is high?
• Consumer impact:
  – What would make them buy more local products?
  – What would stop them from buying local?
  – What would they like to improve in the fresh produce section of your supermarket?
  – What would you change about the organisation of the shelves?
  – What would be good to change about the labelling of local products?
  – What could be improved in terms of prices?

And voilà ! 🙂

Affinity diagram

At the end of our interviews, we grouped our results in Miro with post-it notes which we then classified by affinity.

• Where are the design oppotunity ?

Given the amount of information we had, we gave ourselves 10 minutes (5 choices per person) to select the design opportunities that we felt stood out.

• The design opportunity we choose to explore

Then we had a second round for 5 minutes (1 vote per person) on the remaining post-its.

We voted unanimously for a “Lack of transparency: information is sometimes insufficient, incomplete or misleading, and not easily understandable”

Problem statement

Adults responsible for grocery shopping need a way to have more transparency on fresh and local products’ informations because they would like to choose the healthiest products and spending less time in store

Pain points & Key insight

Our analysis of the interviews, allowed us to identify the pain points and related key insight:

“It is difficult to understand what justifies the price of a local product and what makes its added value, based on the information I have access to”

Consumers regret the lack of transparency and would like to understand what differentiates local products from conventional products

“sometimes we need to go in different stores to do our shopping because it is hard to adapt to supermarkets’ limited offers”

Users would like to have everything in the same place (local, organic, fresh products), without changing their shopping routine

“With limited budget, it seems difficult to us to buy local”

Consumers would like to consume local seasonal products but without having to recalculate their food budget

User persona

From the previous stage, we independently thought of a typical profile that represents the majority of customers.

Then, together, we drew up the profile of Julie below :

User journey

We established Julie’s journey (below) to complete her entire shopping experience.

For each step of her shopping process we measured her emotions to identify, finally, the opportunities for improvement that we have as a UX/UI designer.

Let’s brainstorm !

For this stage of the project, we took 5 minutes to brainstorm ideas for solutions.
Then we presented our ideas and identified common ideas together.

We found it opportune to create : a scan app providing the user transparent information about products and help them choose faster, based on their priorities

With the following features:

• product identification
• product comparaison
• Access to detailed information based on analysed data : composition, price and origins

And now, what does our solution look like?

Overall, when our user launches the application, they will be able to click on the button (screen1 ) to scan the desired product (screen2).
Once the product has been identified (screen 3), they will either be able to go directly to the product page or compare with a second product.

Path 1 — “I want to see only the page of the product page”

Once the product is identified, the application automatically proposes to the user to be able to see one of the 4 proposed information on the product: season, country, region, harvest :

By clicking on the “view product” button, the user is taken to the product page below only:

Once on the product page, they can, if they wish, click on the chevrons to open the details of the available sections (Origin, Composition, Producer, Dates, How to choose the product).

Path 2 — “I want to compare with a second product”

If the user wishes to compare with another product by clicking on the “Compare” button, the user will scan the second product (screen 5).
Then the two products will be compared (screen 6) on the basis of the information available.

Concept testing

To ensure that people buy into our concept, we presented the solution to the interviewees.