Week 1: UX/UI IronHack Bootcamp
The first week of my UX/UI Bootcamp has passed and I can’t believe how fast it went.
We started directly working on a project around a wicked problem and learned how to apply the Design Thinking Process, a framework for innovation that promotes collaboratively work between designers with business and technology to make products that are not only needed by the users but also have a solid business idea and technology to sustain them.
The goal of this 4-day first project was to take that wicked problem as a design challenge and after researching and understanding the problem, come up with an idea of a solution around it to improve the people’s experience.
My team and I were very excited to pick the food sustainability problem as a subject for our project and started right away with our User-Centered Design Process, which by definition has the user as essence.
As mentioned above, our wicked problem was around food sustainability and finding a way to help more customers getting to local products, making the relationship between producers and customers better.
After researching and talking about this problem as a group to be sure we all understood it, we were off to start our research and get the user’s insight.
EMPATHIZE
Survey
As a base for our research, we made use of both quantitative and qualitative methods to have a better picture of our user and be able to mix the data we received.
We started by creating a series of questions for our survey based on a Lean Survey Canvas, template which was provided to us as a structure to organize and lead us to create our questions, starting from asking ourselves “what do we need to learn”, “who do need to learn it from?” and, “what information do we already have?”
Our questions were around the actual information the user had about fair local produce, their grocery shopping habits, and their will to buy more sustainable products. Some of them were: What level of knowledge do you have on seasonal products? What kind of groceries do you normally buy? How often do you buy local organic produce?
Interviews
As a second step, we also worked on an interview guide to come up with our interview questions the best way possible. At this point, we already had received and reviewed our survey results so reforming interviews would not only give us the opportunity to get wider and more open answers from our users but also gave us the chance to confirm some ideas, assumptions, and insights we found on our survey responses.
Here we considered demographics, background, goals of our research our target, and some assumptions we already had, and from there possible topics and questions.
DEFINE
What did we discover? User Insights
Affinity diagram + HMW → everything we heard from surveys/interviews
At this point and having reviewed all the responses from our surveys and interviews, we used an Affinity Diagram to help us dissect that data in order to see the relationship between the different pieces and find interesting patterns.
The affinity diagram organizes ideas with following steps:
Record each idea on cards or notes.
Look for ideas that seem to be related.
Sort cards into groups until all cards have been used.
This diagram devised by Jiro Kawakita in the 1960s is very simple and interactive. We started by grouping the data by recognizing similarities or affinities and after that, created categories as headers for those groups of insights.
Having this visual organization of similar pieces of data, it was easier for us to identify repeating patterns or important pain points that could be turned into design opportunities.
At this point, we had found a pattern of data that we could turn into insights.
Some of those interesting pieces of data indicated to us that the users were open to learn more from sustainable food options and purchase them in the regular supermarkets they already visited, as they were not in a position to actively make more efforts to support the local producers due to a lack of time.
How might we? Turning data into insights
The next step and to help us as a team, to organize and focus our efforts into one viable solution, we worked on creating how-might-we Statements, and with them, reframe our problem as opportunities.
We created a series of statements based on our previously found patterns, grouped them by similarities, and then we each voted for the ones we believed should be prioritized. To ensure a good pace at decision making we all voted in silence and our chosen statement was “How might we make local produce more accessible to consumers?
Reviewing this prioritization opened the door for conversations but at this point, the process was going smoothly and we all knew we had to make decisions in that direction which was more likely to throw good results for our research.
Empathy Map
The next step was working on an empathy map, where we collected all more concise information in questions aimed to connect and empathize with our users. This way we could understand them better and start creating a user persona.
This chart has six sections that reflect key traits demonstrated by the user during the research, that way, this map provides an overview of a person’s experience.
In our case, our users were young people around their mid-twenties, who have limited time to do their grocery shopping. Even when they showed interest in sustainability and buying more sustainable products, they wished the information was given to them directly through their classic shopping channels like regular supermarkets; they didn't really want to make an extra effort for supporting local producers.
User Persona
From this information, we created our persona, Juan, the graphic designer from Berlin.
Problem Statement and Hypothesis Statement
Now that we had our persona, we went into defining the main issue to be addressed by us and created a problem statement.
Problem statements are created based on the pain-points and opportunities we uncovered during the research phase. These are important because they define the project’s main objective.
And so was our problem formulated :
Consumers need to quickly find sustainable products and info on their origins in their nearby regular stores because they want to support the local sustainable food industry without time loss.
Ours responded to the following questions :
- What product/service will we design for?
- What goals was this product/service designed to achieve?
- Based on our research, which user’s needs/goals are currently not met?
Based on the problem we now had clarified, we created a hypothesis statement.
This hypothesis helps us to think about what results we should look for in an experiment, and, work as predictions that bring us to think about different aspects of the project and gather answers to our questions as designers.
Our hypothesis goes as follows :
We believe increasing the visibility of local produce and its information in regular supermarkets will achieve an informed, efficient, and short shopping experience.
We will know we are right when the demand and sales of local produce increase by 10% in supermarkets.
With this prediction, we tried to cover the main points of our problem and, in this case, imagined realistic criteria that would help us know if we succeeded or failed.
IDEATE
Ideation Technique: Crazy 8s
Now that we had defined the problem and have a clear idea of who our users are (their frustrations, goals, and motivations), we used an exercise that helped us to come up with ideas on how to design a product that will help our users accomplish their goals and be the solution to that problem.
In this case, we chose to use the Crazy 8s exercise which has the goal of coming up with 8 different ideas in 8 minutes and is designed to combat the pattern of sticking to the first idea by forcing us to generate lots of them in a short period of time(before going into details).
Every member of my team worked on their 8 ideas and sketched them on paper. We later showed our ideas to everyone, discussed how one could complement the other, and finally decided on the best one.
I must say this phase was highly exciting but also complicated. It seems easy just sketching very basic ideas but the time is so short it results really challenging.
Our idea
As our solution, we came up with a labeling system based on colors, green, yellow, and orange that would tell the user directly and without confusion, how sustainable the product is. This might include if the product was locally produced, how many kilometers it had to travel to get to the location, how much water was used in production, Co2 footprint, among others.
That way they could make a better and faster choice in the supermarket, support local brands, and have a nicer experience shopping.
This labeling would be seen on the price labels and would be explained in big informative panels.
Why those colors?
We considered green for being mostly perceived as positive, the yellow for being more neutral or in the middle, and the orange to replace a possible red which might have been too strong and negative.
As a way of an extra reward for the user, we complemented this labeling by including a message on their shopping receipt, where they can see directly how much in percentage, their purchase was.
User Journey Map
With our idea fixed and in order to map the experience of our user Juan, we created a journey map, where apart from seeing clearly the steps he takes when he does his grocery shopping, we can also see his different moods during the whole process.
In our case, we used a future journey, which demonstrates the way Juan could interact with our solution.
On this map, we see how he’s been stressed at work and just wants to get home. On his way, he remembers he still needs to do the shopping for groceries, and when he finally gets to the supermarket, he feels overwhelmed and confused. His anxiety goes down when he notices the new color labels and posters the market has recently put up with clear and direct facts about the products he wants to buy, so he guides his purchases by this labeling and after paying, he notices a friendly message where he can see how sustainable his shopping was.
Next Steps
- Contemplating adding icons to the labeling, to cover possible problems our users might have at differentiating colors.
- Researching which exact points would the users would want to see in the labeling.
- Testing different ways of showing the informative panels, especially at the introduction phase, would be highly important for the users to understand and get used to this new system.
