This project was fueled by my interests in cooking and sustainability. Many people believe that buying locally-grown produce is healthier and more eco-friendly. I wanted to explore this space and see what opportunities arose for development.

In a preliminary survey asking 29 people about their grocery shopping habits, I found out that shoppers generally had poor understanding about food seasonality and lacked sources of information.

Interviewees were pulled from the pool of survey respondents. I wanted to chat with people who mentioned planning before a grocery trip (whether that be a list or otherwise) and spoke positively about seasonal produce.

There were broad trends in both groups about grocery shopping attitudes - for example, a  majority of survey respondents and interviewees said they disliked grocery shopping and were concerned about prices at the store.

People in both groups were also very likely to gravitate toward favorite or familiar (staple) items, rather than spend time looking for something new.

Several similar attitudes (re: shopping, seasonality), pain points (re: shopping, budgets, and seasonality), and needs arose in interviews. I wanted to address the intersection of these 3 categories with the project.

Using the Jobs to be Done framework to understand each persona’s needs would help me prioritize solutions. While there were difference to each persona’s functional and emotional needs, there was strong agreement on topics like price, supporting local businesses, and meeting dietary needs.

One unique need for routine-driven shoppers is the need to keep decision and cognitive loads low. These folks don’t have the time or patience to mix things up, so keeping solutions minimally invasive would be important for them.

For variety-driven shoppers, there was a need to make a grocery list. Since they don’t rely as much on staples, it’s important that the solution can cater to weekly grocery flexibility.

Using the persona goals, needs, and pain points, I brainstormed several different possible solutions. Using the identified share functional needs from JtbD, the most useful potential ideas were pulled out as 14 unique features.Because this app is focusing on the MVP, it was important to evaluate which functionality would be necessary for Phase 1 of design and development. I used an impact vs. effort chart to determine must-haves.

Based on the people I interviews, the personas, and the features identified for the MVP, I worked on coming up with brand values for the app. The product would be educational but useful, personal, and targeted toward the 20-30s demographic. Evaluating 33 unique values on an “on brand” vs. “unique” chart, the following values were selected:

I was focusing on developing 3 main features: onboarding, curated recommendations, and produce details. User flows were developed to help understand the interactions, and then “happy path” task flows were created from those.

The options dropdown flow tested the best in rounds of informal testing, and moved to higher fidelity.

Testing was completed via Maze with 11 participants, and focused on the 3 core features designed:

Results were mixed. The biggest difficulties people faced were understanding the labels (ex: “my list” vs. “staples” and the seasonal category names). Many users also expected to be able to navigate to a produce page directly from the seasonality guide, which did not have interactions built in.

I think my biggest takeaway from this experience is that testing labels and copy during early design phases is so important.