Summer 2021, Remote
Mobile application that facilitates the ordering and delivering of goods + produce from local farmers to nearby consumers.
10 minutes reading time
Product Details
About Farmbox
Farm Box’s conceptualization began as a design challenge to fight food waste and to find a way to get fresh and cheap produce from local farms. The design quickly became a passion project and continued developing the design to high-fidelity.
Problem
Local farmers have surplus produce that is going to waste. There is demand from consumers, but facilitation of delivery is needed.
Challenge
Design a mobile experience for a farm-to-home service that facilitates weekly pickup and delivery of produce to nearby homes.
My Role
As a product designer I took part in the UX design and visual design by understanding the user through surveys, market research and competitive analysis, as well as the design for the UI, creating the low-high fidelity prototype, and interaction design.
Duration
July - August 2021
Tools
Adobe XD, Photoshop
Identifying Target Audience
The first thing I wanted to do was try to understand the goals and challenges of this application’s potential users. I determined that there would be 3 primary user groups for this application: the consumers, the farmers and the delivery drivers. I wrote user stories for each of the user groups to help contextualize the perspectives of each of these groups.
Consumers
As a consumer I want to order fresh, local produce so that I can eat seasonal + nutritious food while supporting local farmers.
Farmers
As a farmer I want to sell my extra produce directly to local consumers so that I can maximize my profits and stay in business.
Drivers
As a driver I want to earn as much money as possible during the timeframes my schedule allows so that I can supplement my income and make extra money.
It was helpful to have all three user perspectives accounted for, though for the purposes of this case study we will primarily focus on the experience of the consumer.
Empathy Mapping
Next I began trying to understand the consumer target audience within the context of the product. I created an empathy map with the steps of: needing groceries, discovering local farm options, downloading the app, exploring the app, and placing an order.I attempted to put myself into the consumers shoes and really understand what they might be thinking, doing, and feeling during each step.
Then I summarized what the pain-points and goals of each step would be.
This exercise was incredibly helpful in informing the direction of the design. Some of the major insights gained included:
Grocery shopping and meal planning in general can be very stressful and overwhelming, add onto that onboarding a new platform and shopping in an unfamiliar way and we had a potentially very stressful process for the user. We wanted to make sure we guided them into the experience as much as possible.
I decided to make the home page a hub for easy entry points into the experience - showing displays of seasonal items, bestsellers, and curated boxes.
Additionally, I made the decision to have the search feature as one of the primary navigation options on the dock. This way the user always had quick and easy access to find what they were looking for.
Lastly, because the level of effort associated with meal planning and grocery shopping is already high, I made the decision to allow users to bypass account registration before checking out the app. Though many competitors do not allow new users to do this, I felt this was an important decision to help ease the barrier to entry for new users.
Proto Persona
Using insights garnered through creating the empathy map I began creating a proto-persona of the customer.
I envisioned the consumer to be a person who would feel good about themselves for supporting local farmers.
(because running to the store or using a grocery delivery service would be more simple than using a product like this) I also envisioned them to be a fairly health-conscious consumer as they are looking for the freshest produce they can find.
Defining User Needs
After gaining a better understanding of the customer as an end user, I began defining the goals and needs they would have when interacting with the app. I listed each need I could think of for the user, then I listed potential features for each task that could help them accomplish each goal.
For example:
As a customer I need to see which types of produce are in season -> potential features to offer for this goal would be filtering options for in season items, as well as featuring in-season items in a central location in the app
User Journey
After gaining a better understanding of the customer as an end user, I began defining the goals and needs they would have when interacting with the app. I listed each need I could think of for the user, then I listed potential features for each task that could help them accomplish each goal.
I also created user flows for tasks such as:
- learning more about items: including whether items are in season & seeing detailed information about items
- adding items to cart
- searching for farms and/or products and
- placing an order: including the user decision between delivery and pickup
Competitive Audits
Once I felt like I had explored the problem space in-depth I moved on ideating for potential solutions.
I downloaded (a lot) of apps on my phone - I was looking at direct competitors and also adjacent industries such as food delivery services like door dash + uber eats. I wanted to explore the ways in which this market was solving problems already, and I started a collection of screenshots to help me through the sketching + piecing together of interfaces.
Sketches
Here are some samples of the sketches I created during the ideation phase of my design process.
Low-fidelity concepts
We split up to create our own low-fidelity concepts to generate as many unique ideas as possible and disregarded constraints to explore the most creative solutions.We also used this as an opportunity to visualize and decide on the most efficient user flows.
UI refinement
We put together a brand style concepts and brand attribute for inspiration before creating our own design system.
While also authentic and competent, this direction is mostly playful, creative, and approachable. It’s characterized by lots of open space, rounded cards, clean, rounded buttons, and organic, flowing shapes filled with color.
Establishing a design system
Once we felt we were in agreement with the visual feel, we decided on a design system to ensure consistency across all screens and ease the development process.
Final Designs
Each feature below was driven by research, user stories, and creativity.
Onboarding Experience
A first-time user onboarding flow that will introduce the app, and feature to our user.
Home Feed, Shopping & Checkout
After the onboarding, new users will be prompt to the home feed where they can view farms with listings made nearby or search and filter for a more specific food opportunity. Users can select different fresh produce from farms, they can customize their own fresh produce box. The checkout process begins as soon as the item is added to the shopping basket. Users can select shipment method or local pickup after that users can select different payment method — PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, Apple Pay.
Order Details
Providing customers with accurate shipping information and tracking updates.
Goals for future next steps
To build out the farmer and delivery driver side of the application, look for ways to assist the consumer in meal & recipe planning, as well as with the usage of seasonal or unfamiliar ingredients would be, and the biggest next step would be to conduct research on the target audience and run usability tests on the prototype
