Huertify (Case Study)
My first project at the Ironhack Bootcamp was fastpased, exciting and eyeopening.
Overview
We were given the following brief to work on an application for the local produce company ‘Huertify’:
“As a user I want to buy local products and I want to know where they come from and when they have been collected. And I want all the possible facilities for me to receive them at home. “
My team of 3 (MyNameIsPablo, Valentina and I) worked together on the brief to produce an MVP which we would present at the end of the week. We decided to use a Design Thinking approach using the new tools we were learning during the Bootcamp.
The Process
Empathise
In order to fully understand our users’ habits, needs and frustrations, we conducted 41 surveys and 6 interviews. We constructed the survey with the help of a Lean Survey Canvas which helped us focus on exactly what we aimed to learn from our user research. Our research focused on how and why people buy food products online, as well as their habits and motivations for shopping locally.
We then collated all of the information onto an Empathy Map to start to organize our research in one place.
From this, we identified the main pain points of the user:
- Users shop online to save time and energy.
- Users like to food shop locally mainly for environmental reasons and because they associate it with better quality, however they often don’t due to time restraints.
- The biggest frustration with shopping online was deliveries arriving when they weren’t at home to recieve them.
Define
Now that we could better understand our user, we were ready to use the information we gathered to start defining what the main problems were. We created a User Persona (Margarita Lopez) and her User Journey to focus the team on the most important issues. Margarita is a conscious buyer with a demanding job which means she doesn’t have the time to go to her local shops and is rarely home to recieve deliveries.
By taking the biggest pain points in the user journey and asking ourselves ‘How Might We’ resolve them, we came up with the following questions:
- How might we anticipate the needs of our users?
- How might we provide the user with all the information they want to know about the product?
- How might we offer more specific and flexible delivery times?
- How might we control the quality of the products we provide?
Ideate
These questions really got our creative juices flowing! We collected all our ideas in a mind map which allowed us to pool everything that we had learned so far together in one place.
Organizing our findings we decided that a subscription service would best suit users like Margarita Lopez as it would save them the most amount of time and secure that they would always have fresh products at home. With that decision made, we turned to Crazy 8s in order to imagine how this service might work. By taking the best ideas from each we developed our first lo-fi prototype…
Prototype
We decided to prototype the sign-up process of the app as it best explains all of its features. These include:
- A weekly subsription service so that the user will constantly have fresh, locally sourced produce at home without a second thought. The products for each box are selected by the quality of that weeks produce.
- The user can select what kinds of products they would like to recieve. E.g. some may want fruit and veg but not dairy products.
- There are 3 different plans available offering more or less products depending on how many people are in your household. The plan can be easily paused/resumed from the dashboard.
- A slider to select exactly what time each week they would like to recieve their subscription box. This can be easily edited from the dashboard.
- Various forms of payment for the user to choose from.
- The dashboard displays a map which indicates where the food from each week has been sourced. The user can find out more information about each farm by selecting the location points.
- The dashboard displays a live tracking of the delivery, including when the produce has been harvested.
Test
During the testing we noticed that our prototype was missing information. As a result, we added headers to each screen for the user to better understand where they were in the app.
We also recieved feedback that some users would prefer to buy products as a one-off without needing to subscribe. The team and I would like to develop this feature in the future to make for a more well-rounded app.
Conclusion & Key Takeaways
I don’t think I will ever stop appreciating how useful talking directly with the users is. A brief which seemed scary at first, began to make sense as soon as we started the user research.
Using programs like Miro, Mural and Google Suite made collaborating remotely as a team much easier. I thouroughly enjoyed working with MyNameIsPablo and Valentina on this project and putting together our ideas to create an MVP in such little time was extremely rewarding.
Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed our product!
