UX Case study: reshaping local food in the Azores
Welcome! I will walk you through the exciting journey of my second project at IronHack.
This has been possible thanks to my team: Tineke Baan, Shaily Gandhi and Vanda Aragão. We worked together for 3 weeks, designing with Figma.
Scope of the project: building an e-commerce platform for a local shop/store with little or no online presence. The project was done following the Design Thinking method.
Why? Because local shops and practitioners are suffering a decrease in the demand for their services and products due to the extreme situation COVID-19 pushed worldwide. This can affect local economies and many families. Alongside this, we can see true intent and a growing trend to support local businesses in many communities.
Business & user research
Why Marmitas?
Marmitas Da Horta is located in Horta, Azores (Portugal). Many reasons led to choosing Marmitas, but standing out was the business itself: local and organic ingredients from the Azores, cooked in a completely different way. It’s vegan and exotic food, ready at home or at work!
Meeting Diana, the stakeholder
Marmitas is a home-based business running for 8 months already, started by Diana, who wants to make a positive impact on health habits and sustainability.
She cooks vegan meals for the community and gives the option to deliver the meals, or pick them up at her place. To avoid waste, customers can bring their own boxes to get the food.
We interviewed her by video call because we wanted to see her reactions and expressions when talking about her business. Understanding her needs and fears was the first to do for us.
She plans to expand Marmitas and rent a kitchen (by the time we finished the project she found one!) as she had a rocky start and lots of people requested her food.
The organization is run through Instagram and Whatsapp. She advertises her menu on Saturday, and customers send a message on Instagram to reserve their meal/s for the week. After that, the communication is done via WhatsApp. As for now, she has limited capacity, so once the maximum quantity of meals is reached, it’s not possible to order more. Although if she gets free spots, they are announced on Instagram.
The prices for the meals are all the same and fixed, plus 1 euro if you want the food delivered.
All the ingredients she uses are fresh and organic, as this is the mantra of Marmitas. She buys them from farmers or in the local market, in order to get local ingredients from the Azores.
Problems?
Instagram and WhatsApp are not the best tools to keep track of the orders and have a good organization. This problem will increase once she moves to a new kitchen and has more customers.
Her online presence is very small. Although she offers a lot of content and tips on Instagram, there is no visibility about how she works, her story and, as a crucial part, the menu she has every week.
How can we help Diana?
On one hand, we want to offer her a desktop app that highlights the quality of the food, providing a clear view of the weekly menu, her ethics and how she works.
On the other hand, the website will facilitate the process of ordering one or multiple meals and will engage users to keep up with a healthy lifestyle.
Competitor analysis&SWOT analysis
Diana has some competitors in Horta, but none of them offers the same service as she does.
To have a clearer overview, we decided to do a Feature comparison and a SWOT analysis.
We could see how she could stand out by giving information related to ingredients, nutrition and providing sustainable packaging. Her competitors don’t offer these features, or just partially.
For the SWOT, this is the result:
The opportunities and strengths are huge, and the weaknesses of Diana were easy to fix. We will provide the online presence, help her grow, and she could hire more people to help in the kitchen.
What people from Horta say
We interviewed three regular customers, but we also wanted to interview potential customers, so we interviewed two other people who are conscious about what they eat and order food regularly.
With the Affinity Diagram, we could focus on the important information.
- Frustration for finding strange ingredients in the food of the supermarket
- Good feelings when ordering at Marmitas
- The sustainable packaging
- What they like about Marmitas: healthy, low delivery costs, variety…
Healthy Hannah, our primary user persona
To create Hannah we extracted all the info from the interviews.
· Lifestyle: busy workers, some with children. All of them were concerned about their health, exercised every day and, when buying food, were always looking for natural and organic ingredients.
· Concerns: climate change and sustainability. We heard critics to ready meals from supermarkets, with additives and imported products.
· What they don’t like: the food served in Horta’s restaurants, for being always the same and not cooking new things. None of them is vegan, but they love vegan food for being tasty and different. This is a very interesting fact for me, as it makes Marmitas attractive for everyone, no matter if you are vegan or not.
Based on the interviews with people not living on the island, we know they value the pictures and the variety of options. The experience of buying and seeing the products is very important, and knowing the ingredients is a plus. Having the delivery option is a must for them.
Hanna’s journey
We can confidently say that: eco-conscious, busy professionals need to find healthy, ready-made meals with local ingredients because they don’t have time to cook themselves.
From this problem statement, we had some questions:
- How might we help customers keep a healthy lifestyle while saving time?
- How might we help customers have ready-made, tasty, home-cooked meals?
- How might we help customers maintain an eco-friendly lifestyle?
When you put everything out of your head…
This is the most exciting part of the Project, when I could share my ideas and let flow the new ones coming up while drawing or writing.
We needed to deliver a website where the users had complete information about what they were going to eat, from sources, to ingredients and packaging.
With this prioritizacion we could focus on delivering a high-quality product, instead of multiple features that might not work well or not be completely accepted by the users at an early stage.
Based on our research, a must should be the information about ingredients and nutrition facts. This nutritional value is not focused on the calories, but on the actual value that the food was adding to their body and general health.
To me, the pictures were crucial because, as we could see during interviews, photos determine a big portion of your decisions when you buy a product, mostly when is food as it goes through the eyes.
The option to buy a box is a continuation of what she has but, to encourage customers to bring their own and reinforce the sustainable concept, Diana will overcharge when users decide not to bring their boxes, avoiding waste.
After deciding this, we defined our MVP:
The goal of the Marmitas da Horta website is to display weekly meals with options to purchase. Therefore, we must do the following:
Create a visual menu page, where users can see all the information related to ingredients and nutrition facts. Customers will have the option to deliver or pick up, and the “buy a box” option.
By ensuring access to all this information, users will be able to choose their meals and organize their week with full knowledge about what they are buying and its impact on the environment and their bodies.
I added all my input on ideation. I consider it crucial to have good photos as the centre of the experience, together with clear and easy to read information. The option to order should be clear and possible to see at a glance.
Once the structure was clear, we continued with Hanna’s path. What does she want to do at Marmitas website?
Test, test, test
After putting everything together, we did our lo-fi prototype and test it with 5 different people to get feedback about the content and its display.
We were happy because they could understand the concept of the website, but there was a lot of improvement to be done: more clarity on “home page”, better display of content on “order here”, and helping customers to edit their orders on the “checkout page”
This is a video of the final result:
Click here if you want to test our prototype following Hanna’s user flow:
- Go to order and select 3 units for Wednesday to buy
2. Log in and select the food to be delivered between 12 and 13
3. Pay with MBWay
We wanted to take a step further and decided to use Useberry, a tool to test your prototype and reach a broader audience while getting good data. I really recommend it if you are short on time for your testing sessions!
These are the results (10 people tested)
What did we learn? The main struggle was on the Main page, where testers clicked in different parts of the page to find “Order here”.
The feedback from the testing sessions was very insightful. The improvements we did on “Order here” page were a success. The room for improvement was mainly on the home and checkout pages.
- Homepage:
- There was confusion about this screen being the about or home page.
- Button “Order here” generated confusion for being highlighted.
- Testers would like to have an overview of the menu for the next day on this screen.
- Checkout:
- Testers couldn’t edit or cancel their orders. There is an option to add/remove items but it wasn't clear enough, as they didn’t realise its purpose.
- Testers were confused by the box and the price, as it wasn’t explained before what this meant.
What’s next?
It’s time to decide what to do next. The testing was a success, as everyone understood the concept and could complete all the tasks. Nonetheless, I feel Hannah would like to understand how the business works from the beginning, and also will appreciate having a separate page where she can read all about Diana’s story, philosophy, content, etc.
Having this in mind, we will jump into our hi-fi and bring her a website where she can immerse herself, not only to buy Diana’s delicious food but also to know her business and learn all about it, so she can implement it in her life.
Conclusions
Overall, this was a beautiful project where I felt very comfortable and motivated because of and my team and the business we worked with.
It’s a real business, in which the stakeholder, Diana, was cooperating with us all the time for what I am very grateful to her. She is just starting, which means the help she needed was real and well welcomed.
Having the opportunity to directly help someone, together with a business that promotes eco-consciousness and a healthier lifestyle, has been key in our steps.
On the other hand, working together with my team has been easy and productive. We managed to work together very well, even though our schedules were completely different.
How did I contribute to this project?
- Interviews with customers, together with a team member, gave us insights to proceed with our prototype. I understood what customers were told to us, and what they needed and were looking for in Diana’s business
- Conducting prototype testing, both for lo-fi and mid-fi with one of my colleagues.
- Giving overview and clarity on user’s interviews by extracting the key information and translating it into product features.
- Prioritizing the tasks by keeping up with the deadlines and achieving a collective solution.
I want to thank my team, as they allowed me to express all my ideas and confront others, this has helped me to feel free and motivated in giving the best out of me. The final outcome has been a solution that meets both, customer and business needs and we will continue improving.
