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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 fostering fair and honest relationships between producers and customers?

FOOD SUSTAINABILITY: Figma project link

After digesting the brief, we began our journey using Design Thinking as our guide. Our point of departure began with a brainstorm.

Brainstorm: We created and grouped post-its/cards into categories to try and make sense of the subject. These categories were the result of re-reading the brief and discussing at great length, we came up with these categories around which we carefully constructed what we wanted to know more about. I admit, we were a little lost and confused. We defined what we seemed to be categories that would help us define what is to be explored, see below.

Secondary Research: Each team-member went to do research on their own. Information was gathered, shared among each other and synthesized.

Qualitative Research: The team worked together to prepare questions to be used for interviews. We want to discover more about user's experiences and we are curious to hear what people have to say about the subject. We conducted interviews with 5 different people. We used Google Meet to join together with video, we recorded the exchange as well as note taking. We gathered insightful data that will help us understand more clearly. This documents briefly our first phase of discovery, part one of the Design Thinking process.

Affinity Diagram / Dot voting: With the interviews done, we went back and took apart our notes taken during the interviews and isolated the notes into “chunks” of information, or smaller phrases of information gathered onto “post-its”. The post-its were then re-dispersed into groups that were based on the responses to the questions that we had. Keep in mind that these were dialogs and the kinds of questions that we asked were open-ended and they had the freedom to respond as they wished, so we gathered more information than we asked for. The organising of post-its required lots of thinking-out-loud as we were three to share this endeavor remotely, using FigJam. We explored many possibilities to organise the data. We even tried using the integrated IA feature that is able to propose grouping based on the content of the post-its. The results were interesting, it came up with categories that were relevant and at first glance, quite accurate. But after further examination we found that the organisation was based on the words in the notes but there was a lack of understanding, therefore not effective for us at this phase. We organised our data in groups, we found significant categories and subcategories that we named. By the end of our Affinity Diagram, and much discussion, we used Dot Voting to filter out the ‘Important’ parts of data gathered, so that we may move forward to the next phase.

Are not real people yet they are based on the data collected from the interviews. We are able to create an ideal persona and as well as accommodating the secondary type persona. This helps remind us “who” the user is, determine what the product should do or how it should behave, build consensus and commitment to the design direction, help personalise the product, avoid being generic and help the team be much more interested in creating a user-centric product. Personas become part of the reasoning and part of the onboarding. Get leadership support, involve other departments, explain how to use personas, present personas & user journeys together. We now design for “Pratique Steve”.

The Journey Map helped us identify a series of steps from A to Z to realise his need to do his shopping for the week, along the way we found moments that we problematic and difficult, we can see through the eyes of the persona, based upon real findings gathered from our interviews, to identify “pain points” that are represent, the “opportunities” to make better.

● How can we reduce the time we spend shopping?

● How can we make organic less expensive?

● How can we raise awareness of organic, local and seasonal produce?

● How can we offer healthy, high-quality food for quick meals?

● How can we provide all-day access to organic, local and seasonal produce?

The “Crazy 8”, a technique for rapid sketching, picturing solutions to the problem statement. Each member participating, we used an Eisenhower Matrix to evaluate the Difficulty (less-more) vs. Priority (high-low) to establish where these ideas were. We had ideas that landed in all four quadrants, we conducted silent voting, adding our thoughts to each.

The Eisenhower Matrix, helped us define what was a priority for the Minimum Viable Product and the ease or difficulty of integrating these features. This step helped us realize a flow chart, the series of screens to do a given task.

An interactive prototype was built so we could test our solution.

Two out of three, didn’t directly understand that these were ready-to-eat meals, but rather recipes to be prepared.

Two out of three, would like to plan the delivery of these meals over several weeks: to be able to choose meals every week.

Two out of three, had positive feedback on the “Meals” page, which highlights the origin of products and price transparency.

This concludes a 5 day sprint, an intense journey for a Design Thinking workshop. The steps include: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype & Test. We found substantial evidence through interviews and secondary research in order to define the problems that gave us a solid foundation upon which we built a prototype that allowed us to test our hypothesis. This concludes our project, and I would like to continue to build upon this to develop upon our discoveries and produce a high resolution version. I thank my teammates for their support and collaboration.

● Deposit system for meal packaging
● Highlighting of anti-gaspi dishes

● Diversity of our profiles, which complement each other
● Importance of adaptability
● Importance of task sharing
● Collaboration, mutual support to learn together
● Time management and the search for rapid solutions