Sustainability for Supermarkets
Hey there, here’s a story on how my group at IronHack and I came up with a product to help support the sustainable food industry.
This was my first UX/UI Design project and I was excited to apply my newly acquired skills to develop a product that would bring good to the world together with my teammates, Jaione C., Milu S., and Jen M.
Our first mission was to define a problem and solve it using the Wicked Problem Approach, which is an alternative to linear thinking and is split into two phases: problem definition and problem-solving.
The problem definition phase included: Surveys, interviews, an affinity diagram, and user personas. The problem-solving included: problem and hypothesis statements, ideation, hypothesis solution, and persona journey.
My team and I chose to focus on the sustainable food industry. We were not required to submit a polished product but focus on isolating, researching, and understanding the problem.
The problem we wanted to help solve was making sustainable food more accessible. We wasted no time and got to work!
The wicked problem:
Enter: Design Thinking method. Since we already had the general direction to explore we got straight down to user research in order to define the problem.
First, we started with EMPATHISE
User research is vital, we did surveys and interviews to gain more insight. A lean survey canvas helped us figure out: what we know already, what we need to know, who the users are we need to approach and how to reach them. Then come up with questions to ask. maximum 15 because otherwise we will scare them away or bore them to bits. We used Google forms, it’s a well-structured, easy-to-use platform that has great UX design for the users to use. puh…lots of “use”.
We asked:
25–55-year-olds
living in Berlin
people who do their own grocery shopping
What did we want to know?
Whether they are aware of local produce sources, whether they are aware of seasonal produce and if they would like to see local farmers gain more support, and WHAT is stopping them from already doing so if they don’t.
The surveys gave us some interesting data. We learned:
Interesting right? I thought so.
Ok, then we moved on to gain more insights because we are greedy like that.
We conducted user interviews! online of course, because you know, corona and all that.
We asked questions about their shopping routine, whether they plan ahead, whether they buy locally, why they buy where they buy..you get the gist…
and finally, we got these insights by collecting all our feedback and making an affinity map.
From these main points, we were getting closer to the main problem we need to solve. Doing How-might-wes was the next step. My team and I wrote down many ideas on “how might we fix this detailed issue”, gathered them together, and then voted again. Here was our final How might we: “ How might we make local produce more accessible to consumers?”
Yes!… that’s right! we are now coming to user personas, how did you guess? You’re good!
Since you asked for a reminder of what a user persona is, I will tell you! A user persona is a made-up person, that represents the demographics of our general user. It helps keep the focus on our main user, rather than losing focus and wanting to help everyone out…because we are so loving like that. Personas also help focus on our users not let our bias take over.
Here we have Juan, our persona:
Now we have the persona, we could move on to the Problem statement and Hypothesis:
Ok now on to the DEFINE stage of our design thinking.
We now know what users need and their main pain points. so now comes the part where we figure out how to help them.
For this project, we did the crazy 8 challenge. Having 1 minute to come up with an idea, sketch it, and move on to the next square. we did that 8 times and it really was a challenge! It may be hard to decipher what on earth we were trying to draw but here you have the results:
We focused on coming up with a solution that would be in stores since our users were lazy buggers and don’t want to go to alternative shops for local produce…just kidding!! they are just super busy and simply don’t have the time for it! Many of our interviewees said they would like to support the local farms, and if they had time they would go to more markets and whatnot, but it just isn’t possible at the moment.
What we came up with was…
A new labeling system!
The idea is to replace already existing labels on the perishable foods, with color-coded labels indicating the level of sustainability. They would also have more info on them, such as where the food comes from exactly, how far it traveled, and whether it is organic or not. However, the main point would be to quickly indicate whether it is sustainable or not. Additionally, every shopper would get a message on their receipt telling them how sustainable their shop was. This brings in a gamification aspect, hoping it would make shoppers want to increase their percentage each time.
AAAANDD then…we tried it out with Juan…here is his (user)journey.
Ok, we have come to the end! But before we say goodbye, here are some final insights to this project:
Due to being mid-studies, I won’t be developing this further at the moment. However, it would be wonderful to come back to this in the near future!
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.
I am super approachable should you want to chat or have any questions about this case study.
