Food Community. The local online farmers market
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Project Background
Overview
Client
Matteo Grasso & Giacomo Grasso
Founders of Food Community
Timeline
Oct 2023 - Jan 2024
Roles
Harold - UX Research, UX Design, UI design with Figma
Willa - Branding
Team
Harold Prior-Palmer
Willa Burton
Company Background
Food Community is a startup that wants to give the residents of Somerset easy access to local, organic food. The company is partnering with 12 producers including dairy farms, fresh fruit & veg growers and bakers to make sure customers can get all they need from Food Community at a lower cost & better quality than supermarkets.
The project seeks to offer an alternative to the global, industrial food chain through creating food relationships in a local, natural food web.
Brief
Customer Research - who is our ideal customer; what are their needs; how can we solve their problems; carry out customer surveys; what are their operational requirements
Market opportunity – what is market size and opportunity ; what are key trends occurring ; what are the risks
Competitor Analysis – who has been successful and failed in this space ; who are currently the big players
Brand – how can we build a successful brand ; what is our messaging ; how can we can differentiate ourselves
Logistics and Distribution – how will the operations behind the business work
UI/UX – prototype design for the consumer, administrator and producer front end
Research
Research goal
‘Find out how and why people in Wincanton, Bruton and Castle Cary shop for their food currently’
Research method
Giacomo and I went into Wincanton, Bruton & Castle Cary and spoke to residents directly. We were giving out free fruit & veg from Matteo and Giacomo’s farm in return for a couple minutes of customers time.
I also compared and contrasted online feedback from other notable food delivery services like Riverford, Abel & Co and Milk & More.
The majority of people we spoke to did not like buying from supermarkets. However their access to good quality, local food was limited especially after Georges Green Grocer closed in 2022 and Somerset Local Food Direct went out of business during covid. The reasons people preferred buying locally and receiving food delivery services are listed below.
Results
Key insights that informed designs
Peoples interest in where their food came from and how it was made encouraged us to require producers to upload more about the origins of their food than is normally required
Peoples interest in supporting their local farmers & shops meant that we really tried to create a sense of ‘giving back to the community’ wherever possible in both the interface and the branding
People really like the social aspect of shopping at a local shop or farmers market. Consumers were already going to be able to see and read about the producer from which their food was going to be bought but to add to this community feel we allowed consumers the ability to directly a message a producer
Producer research
Our producer research was more logistical than generative. Matteo spoke with a couple of the producers we had planned to work with to get a feel for how they operated currently and if they had any specific requests or concerns.
One of the things that became clear was that different producers were going to need to have orders closing at different times. Lievito Bakery for instance was going to need to have all orders in by 12pm to allow for enough time to bake everything. Aki at Off-grid organics, however, would have her orders close at 4pm as it wouldn’t take as long for her to prepare her fresh fruit & veg for pick up.
User personas
Consumer personas
The two consumer personas reflect the variety in goals & pain points we came across during our research:
Elderly people who care most about accessibility to their food
Those who want their food choices to be as transparent as possible so they can get the food that is right for them
Producer personas
Each producer was going to have its own specific needs and pain points based on whether it was predominantly selling perishable or non-perishable food. These two personas reflect this:
Ideation & Information architecture
Why it helped
The information architecture was crucial in giving a macro overview of all the pages and features the platform was going to need. This was helpful for me as a structural bedrock to keep referring back to as I began designing user flows & low-fidelity wireframes. We were also meeting developers at the time, so it was helpful to present this so they could give us an accurate cost estimate which we could then compare and contrast.
Consumer IA
Producer IA
Admin IA
User flows & low-fidelity wireframes
Each feature listed in the IA was more likely than not going to have its own separate user flow which was going to need to be designed. I tried putting them into the IA itself but it ended up looking like snakes & ladders. Instead, in the Figma file I have all the user flows below their respective IA with their accompanying wireframes.
Method
Consumer example
User goal: Customer wishes to claim a refund for their order as it never arrived
Producer example
User goal: Producer wishes to upload a new product
Admin example
User goal: Somerset honey not responded to automatic low stock message after two days. They then respond, drop off a batch of 40 Lavender honey jars. Admin then checks order and updates stock accordingly
Design decisions
Customers we spoke to were keen to have more transparency about where and how their food was grown/ come from.
All products would have a growing/raising method description as well as being transparent about any chemicals/ pesticides/ hormones or antibiotics used. Customers would also be able read more about their producer to get a feel for how they do things and to see where they are located.
Food choice transparency
Producers will get questions specific to the type of product they are uploading. On the right, for instance, are the required fields for uploading meat.
Sense of community/ helping locality
Customers we spoke to preferred to spend their money locally when shopping for food rather than the big supermarkets. We tried to reiterate that this is just what Food Community is all about by having a ‘total amount given back to community’ tally on the my account page.
We also mentioned it again on the order confirmation screen (seen below). This is a crucial moment to mention this as it as at the customers peak emotional moment on their journey as they have done all the hard work of checking out and will be feeling good about themselves and their order.
We also were going to give consumers the chance to directly message producers in case they had any questions or simply to just say how delicious their products were. From our research, people really liked the social aspect of shopping locally so we thought this would be a good way of trying to replicate that.
Iterations
Repeat orders
Originally we had planned to allow for customers to have repeat orders on certain items but we decided this was going to be too complicated logistically for the MVP as producers said they would not able to guarantee stock of any fresh products 2 weeks in advance.
Our research supported this decision as many users found the difference between ‘my orders’ and ‘my regular orders’ to be confusing on the interface of Riverford & Milk & More.
Original
Revised
At first we had designed for two types of accounts for producers: fresh producer account & long life producer account. Fresh producers would pick/ make their food as and when there are orders and then we would come and pick it up the following morning for delivery. Long life producers would bulk stock their stuff at the Food Community warehouse.
However the more producers we talked to, it became clear that more often than not they would have both perishable & non-perishable products to sell (e.g. Off-Grid Organics would have fresh veg & kimchi). As a result we decided to just have one type of account for producers and instead the stocking & distribution question would come up on the list a product flow rather than the account creation flow.
Perishable & non-perishable stocking
Accepting orders
Originally producers were going to have to manually approve each of the fresh items ordered from their shop as seen on the right. This was to prevent customers from over-ordering and to give the producer a chance to double check they have everything in stock that has been ordered.
Original
However during testing it became clear this was going to take producers far too much time to individually accept each item. Instead we made it so the default was that all orders were automatically accepted but producers could still edit the quantity of items if they wanted to. To stop customers over-ordering a maximum order limit was going to be put in for each item.
Revised
High fidelity wireframes
Landing page
More info product page
My orders
Product page
Producer page
Checkout page
Results & reflection
There was much deliberation with developers about whether to code this platform from scratch or to start with a semi or fully mature marketplace plugin. After assessing all the platforms needs along with its idiosyncrasies of having producers manage & edit their own orders, it became clear that the best option for us was the WooCommerce plugin Dokan. This is a fully-mature multi-vendor marketplace that has all of the complex features Food Community requires including order management, messaging, sales analytics & real-time stock updates.
The website was developed by Dokan specialists between January - March 2024. Whilst the limitations of Dokan meant the UI couldn’t be directly implemented like for like, the core features and layout were replicated as best they could based off of the Figma designs. The website has still not fully launched as they are soft launching the product starting with veg box deliveries but here is a sneak peak of the wesbite: https://food-community.co.uk/
Results
What I would have done differently
I would have liked to have gone more in depth with customers during our user research. Though we did gain some good insights I feel there was more to be unrivalled with the ‘whys’ of how people shopped. This was quite difficult to dig into with our brief 3-5 minute chats on the street. It would have required a more conventional user interview setup which we didn’t have the time or budget to organise sadly.
Don’t be too pedantic with low-fidelity wireframes. I wasted a lost of time trying to be pixel perfect in Figma with things like spacing, margins & icons as I thought at one point my designs were to be coded like for like. In hindsight it would have been much more productive to wireframe in something like Axure using limited design tools as I could have spent more time iterating and focusing on user flow issues rather than fiddling about in Figma.