Kraam Lokaal — Sustainable food app (first week of Ironhack)

Our first week of the Ironhack bootcamp started off with a 5 day group project called “wicked problems” in which we had to create a lo-fi prototype for an app solving a problem according to our chosen brief.

In this project I got to work with Miheala Prescornitoiu and the brief we chose was:

FOOD SUSTAINABILITY

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, fuelling fair and honest relationships between producers and customers while ensuring food safety for all?

Empathise

We started tackling our problem with filling in a lean survey canvas to figure out what we wanted to ask in our quantitive research method — a survey, we decided to rule out people that already buy mostly/ only sustainable and organic food because of brand loyalty and financial ability and people who live in rural areas because they have more access to sustainable and seasonal options. 69 participants replayed to our survey teaching us valuable things about people’s approach and opinion on sustainable and organic food. we found out that 46.5% of our survey respondents associate organic food with being healthy, Almost all of the participants stated that they would like to incorporate more organic and sustainable foods into their diet, The most important things to them when buying produce were low price, health conscious, variety and seasonal & local.

With our new information we interviewed 6 potential users that demonstrate the crowd we imagine using our app - 25-45 year olds who live in big cities and are looking to make healthier dietary choices . From the interviews we concluded that though some of our potential users had prior knowledge in what’s local and in season the main problems with getting sustainable food is the price and the accessibility- farmer’s markets are only on on specific days and finding time to get to them does not always fit their busy lifestyle.

Through online research about farmers, organic farming and farmer’s market we found out that it actually costs a lot of money for a farmer to rent out a stall, get the produce there and sales can be affected by multiple factors.

“A successful market requires good foot traffic, decent weather and an abundance of available products, it can be a challenge to find areas that are equipped with this perfect combination.”

-US farmer Dan’l Mackey Almy

Our next step was creating user personas, we decided to create a main one — Ferdi, a young professional living in Amsterdam and our secondary persona — Moud, a mother of 2 living in Den Haag.

Define

After understanding who our target user is and what their needs are it was time to define the problem we are trying to solve, we used user journey graphs to figure out the pain points of our users and came up with the hypothesis statement — We believe that connecting farmers to city based communities for people who want to incorporate more sustainable food into their diet will achieve better awareness about the importance of buying local and seasonal and lower the price of produce while also increasing farmer’s profit . We will know we are right when we see a change in people’s shopping habits.

Ideate

Through brainstorming and mind maps we decided that our main focus is connecting users to local farmers, thus lowering the 3rd party charges that make buying sustainable food so expensive, with an online shop that lets you order from multiple local farmers and producers for larger variety and also provide information about the farmers, events in the farms, recipes for seasonal produce and a supply chain chart that shows how we manage to keep prices competitive while still benefiting the farmers.

Lo-fi prototype

Test

We conducted two testing sessions for our prototype with potential users of the app. After explaining the background and how low-fidelity prototypes work we let them complete a task and browse around while telling us what they think.

Observations

Both users found it easy to complete the task of buying an item. They liked the feature of the farmers map.

Both of them wanted the prototype to be more engaging but for now we kept the flow quite simple — buying 1 item.

Neither of the users clicked on the “meet the farmer” and “see supply chain” at first but found the feature interesting when we pointed them out. The users weren’t sure about the function of the news page.

Opportunities

1. Make the “meet the farmer” and “supply chain” buttons more visible.
2. Create a “keep shopping” button.
3. The users weren’t sure about the function of the news page because of the lack of information but we believe that with the information in it it will be valuable to the user experience.

What we learned and next steps

Throughout this project we became more and more aware of the importance of user testing, surveys and interviews. If this project was to continued we would have done more prototype testing and iterating, come up with a style guide and continue to the design the user interface.