Something wicked this way comes
The world is full of problems, some more easily solved than others. Then there are wicked problems, those that are impossible to solve. These are problems with barriers that are considered insurmountable, that mankind may never overcome. Anything come to mind? Climate change, immigration, healthcare, the list goes on. One such problem that may not instantly come to mind for everyone, but is no less wicked, is Food Sustainability.
Most of us don’t think about where our food comes from, where it starts and what it goes through before being loaded into our shopping cart. How does an avocado grown in California end up in a German supermarket? It may seem like a trivial thought, but the logistics of getting that avocado to Germany can have a marked impact on the climate. But what do you do when you live in Berlin and have a craving for guacamole, you buy the avocado! It’s not something you eat everyday, it’s only one avocado, it’ll go to waste if I don’t buy it, yada yada yada. The list of excuses is endless, the solutions, non-existent.
How do you solve an unsolvable problem, or at least begin to try? When you try to solve problems, you need structure, a framework. UX is about solving problems for a user. What is the world full of, about roughly eight billion users. And whats the best framework to solve problems from a UX mindset? A UX framework. While Rome wasn’t built in a day, can food sustainability, at least on a small scale, be solved in a week? let’s see!
Part 1: User Research
Always begin research by repeating the golden rule: You are NOT the user. Proper research always aims to understand the user; their problems, needs, & perspectives. This understanding occurs stage during something called the Empathize stage, where we aim to understand the user through their problems & pain points. We began by creating a survey to gather insight on the grocery shopping & eating habits of consumers in Berlin. As our subject was sustainable food, we hoped to discover who was purchasing sustainable products and why. Even more so, we wanted to know who wasn’t buying sustainable products and their perceived barriers to doing so.
A big takeaway was that 80% of those surveyed would purchase organic sustainable food if it was lower priced. The next step was to use insights from the survey and conduct interviews. Through these interviews we were able to supplement our previously acquired survey data and move onto the next stage of our project, Define.
During the Define stage we take our data, analyze it and try to define the problem of our user. We used the data we acquired through our survey and interviews to create an affinity diagram to help us find patterns and better understand the user’s problems and pain points.
When displaying the data in an affinity diagram, it allows you identify patterns, themes, and pain points. We as UX designers use these to identify “design opportunities” to improve the experience of our user.
While data is all well and good and an integral part of the design process, data is not a user. People don’t connect with data, they connect with others. This is where the user persona comes in. We as designers create a person(a) to help us put a face to our research. The user persona is build through an empathy map, that helps us to connect with and empathize with our target user. We take our acquired data and structure it from the perspective of a person or user.
After creating the empathy map, we were able to put together the data into a concise persona that closely represented our target user. When creating a user persona in UX design, it’t very important to base them on your data and empathy map, not your personal ideas and preferences.
In this case our data showed that many students were not purchasing sustainable foods and products, and that their main barrier was financial. From the data we acquired, we created Amanda, a user persona that fit our target user.
Although we had acquired data and whittled it down into a person, we had not yet fully defined our problem, so we could not yet develop a possible solution. This is where the “how might we” or HMW statement comes in. These statements allow us to define specific problems, by listing general solutions that we could possibly develop further. As a team, we all developed these statements, together and individually, and then voted to decide which problem(s) to pursue.
After this exercise, we chose to focus on the two most voted statements, simply put, price and convenience. Is it possible to make sustainable food both affordable & convenient? Well we’re not at that stage yet, so at this point it’s future me’s problem. Our next step is take everything we have done so far and use it to clearly and concisely define our problem. This is where we employ problem and hypothesis statements. The problem statement allows us to clearly define our problem, which will help us to generate and develop possible design opportunities.
After we create our problem statement, we can also make a hypothesis statement. This is a prediction of the effect our product will have on the user and their problem/pain point. Hypothesis statements should state how we think our product will help the user and the outcome of interacting with our design. A good hypothesis statement is testable, to allow us to see if our product has had the desired impact on our user.
Now that we have a user persona and a problem, how do we put them together in a human-centered way that the user can understand? In UX design we often use something called a User Journey. A user journey is a visual way of showing the user, their problems, and where our product may help them.
Part 2: Ideation
After the research is completed and we have a workable problem, we can begin to ideate. This stage involves generating ideas, through various methods to find possible solutions that can be develop further. There are several techniques UX designers user to generate these ideas.
Two common techniques, that we employed for this project, were round robin and crazy eights. Round robin uses “additive ideation” where each person begins writes down an idea and then passes it around a circle and everyone, in turn, builds upon the original idea. This can help to see your original idea from different perspectives and embrace collaboration. Another technique is crazy eights. Each person takes 1 minute to generate an idea. After the minute is up, they start a new idea. This process is done a total of eight times and them the ideas are compared.
After this process, team members can vote on ideas and ultimately choose which design opportunity to pursue. Through our crazy eight we developed our concept. We decided to design a membership card, geared towards students and low-income households, that would allow them to shop for sustainable products within their budget.
For this project, we ended our process at the concept stage. Our goal for this specific project was to focus on the user research and to get to the concept stage. If we were to fully develop our idea we would next test our concept with users, and then use their feedback to develop a prototype and test it.r
Although we didn’t go through the entire design process, I did enjoy conducting user research, understanding their pains & needs, and then developing a concept for a possible solution/design opportunity. This process allows designers to get out of their own heads and empathize with a user, which is always the goal of UX design.
