Case Study: Design Thinking Process — how do we make sustainable food the new norm?
Introduction
Are you familiar with Design Thinking?
I’m sure you are, but if you’re not, I suggest you learn about this process through a practical case I had the opportunity to study in group during my UX UI Design bootcamp at Ironhack.
Before getting into the matter’s heart, here is a brief definition of the Design Thinking Process: it’s a 5 steps problem-solving process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
In this particular case we will apply this process to the food sustainability topic, and I bet you feel more concerned already! Indeed, the importance of good nutrition is rising in consciousness since decades, but organic food is still not accessible to everyone, because of its price in particular. With this in mind, let’s see concretely how we might guide and drive people to consume more organic food, with a mobile application.
Research to empathize
The first step of the Design Thinking Process is to better understand the users.
We therefore conducted a quantitative study by integrating relevant questions regarding the way people consume sustainable food today. Tips for you, the Lean Survey Canvas is a great tool to build a form efficiently!
145 answers later, here are the first feedbacks that came out:
More than 70% of respondents consume sustainable food because they believe it’s good for the planet and for their health. 65% think that sustainable food is still too expensive. Finally, interesting fact, most of them want to get more information about this type of food but they don’t take time on their side to look for this information. So, we already have some interesting ideas that we can explore: maybe we can offer them sustainable products with a good quality-price ratio, or maybe we can provide them with all the product’s information needed, so it easily comes to them and they don’t have to look for it. We will see later in this article how this comes to life, but first, let’s come back to the Design Thinking Process.
Following this survey, we conducted a qualitative study with 5 people, with various profiles. We did a 30-minute interview with each of them, asking deliberately open-ended questions to collect a maximum of feedback. For the restitution, we used the Empathy Map.
This tool allows to better understand the state of mind, the pain points and the real needs of the users. It also allows us to imagine the functionalities that these people could expect from our app, but it also helps us to create our User Persona.
A User Persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It’s a very important design tool that helps to understand who will be using the product so you can focus on your users’ abilities and goals.
Let me introduce you to Alice, the concerned and busy consumer:
What have we learned from her that can be helpful in the Design Thinking Process’ next steps?
- She needs to find a larger offer and optimize her purchase in a one-stop-shop, because sustainable food is still not present everywhere.
- She wants to be more aware of how her consumer actions impacts the environment, because today, getting complete information on the product require extra time she doesn’t have.
- She wants to find the best quality / price ratio regarding sustainable food because it’s too expensive.
Now we have a better understanding of Alice’s needs and frustrations, let’s jump in her shoes for a day through the User Journey Map, to see the challenges she faces.
Alice’s Journey Map gives a visual description of the steps she takes to achieve certain goals and how she felt about it along the way.
This tool is super useful for us in order to identify the gaps or pain points she experiences that we may remedy (thanks to the red stars, you will the opportunities we imagined to help her during her journey).
Define
Now we have learned a lot from Alice, it’s time to enter in the second stage of the Design Thinking: defining a problem. How do we proceed here? We gather all the important findings from the previous stage and define a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which is a clear and concise description of Alice’s issues that we need to address. You can use this template to bring it to life:
(User / Customer Type) needs a way to (Problem / Need) because (Insight).
Here is our problem statement:
Alice, a sustainable concerned & busy user needs to be able to do her sustainable groceries shopping in one shop near her while being well informed about the product she buys because she has no time to do extensive research & go to different shops.
Thanks to this problem statement, we can enter to the next stage of the Design Thinking Process and start to ideate!
Ideate
Ideation is all about generating ideas. This is where you explore and come up with as many ideas as possible. You can use a lot of techniques for ideation, we decided to go with the “How Might We” (HMW) method. HMW statements are short and end with an opportunity. You can generate as many HMW statements as you want, and at the end, you can use dot voting to keep the 3 most relevant to move forward. I’m sure you are curious to see what came up from our HMW brainstorm, let’s have a look:
- How might we give Alice the option to get extensive information about the products? (because she has no time to look for it, or don’t find it in store)
- How might we give Alice the possibility to get cheaper sustainable offers? (because according to her, sustainable food is expensive)
- How might we give Alice an easier access to a larger offer? (because she can’t always find everything she needs in the same shop)
Prototype
In this 4th step of the Design Thinking Process, it’s time to experiment and turn ideas into a real product (that will be an app in our case). By building a prototype, you can illustrate your ideas in a way you can test it with people to see if it works.
Our final assignment in this case study was to realize a sketch of our app (so we didn’t go further in the Design Thinking Process meaning we skipped the final step: testing).
You’ll find below the great hand sketch made by one of my teammates and some explanations about our user path, which echoes the user journey map presented earlier and answers the HMW statements.
Spoiler alert: you can’t buy anything on this app, it’s more an app that will help you to make sustainable consumption easier.
Alice enters the app and decides to create our shopping list (made by default with the app of sustainable products only), she clicks on the “List” item and enters the 2nd screen which displays different products’ categories (e.g., Drinks).
When she clicks on the dropdown button, she can select a specific type of product (e.g., soy milk — at this stage, it’s still a “generic” product, she has no details about the product she will buy, meaning she still doesn’t know the reference or the brand).
She selects everything she wants and when she’s done, she enters the 3rd screen where she has an overview of everything she needs.
Then she enters the 4th screen to find a shop located close to here where she’ll be able to find all the articles she needs. She selects the shop she wants, enters the screen 5 and can finally see all the products that match with her shopping list (this selection is made in accordance with the shop referencing).
She’s finally able to see which specific product she will buy in the shop (she has the product’s specific reference, the brand and even the price of the product in this shop). She can also tick the product on her digital shopping list when she grabs the product on shelf.
If she wants more information on a product, she’ll enter to screen 6 and find all she needs to know about the product (environmental impact, transportation, etc.).
When her shopping will be done, she can write a review on a product or also rates this shopping list we made for her to see if this was helpful during her shopping.
To conclude
Thanks to this first team project, we were able to learn a lot about the Design Thinking Process in general but also about all the existing methods we can use to produce a deliverable at each stage! We encounter some challenges as a team because we didn’t know each other’s, we have different backgrounds, and we did this a 100% remotely. At the end, I’m super proud of my team and of what we’ve produced, everybody was super involved, we worked hard to bring this to (almost) life! I also realized, again, how it’s key to know the users, because you’ve your personal feelings about something but they’re sometimes so disconnect from the users’ expectations. Always remember this: you’re not the users, so don’t forget to learn as much as you can from them!
To go further, here are some next improvements we imagine for our app:
- Add a reward system to encourage users to consume sustainable
- Release a daily content about sustainable topics to educate and inform the users
- Add a Click and Collect feature to book your shopping online and collect it in store
Thanks a lot for reading me until here, I hope you learned something and enjoyed the experience. If yes, don’t hesitate to applause below! And all your suggestions are very welcomed of course!