Raizama
A collaborative platform for eco-conscious consumers that want to create greater food transparency and stimulate better food systems
Role: Product Designer, Prototyper, User Researcher | Tools: Figma, Invision, Illustrator | Team: PM, Two Engineers, Graphic Designer
Context
What we eat matters. The food choices we make every day have a big effect on our heath, the health of our communities and the environment. According to the United Nations, by 2050 there will be 9.7 billion people on Earth. Given what humanity eats has growing implications for public health and that soil pollution, greenhouse gases, deforestation, intensive livestock production, animal welfare and food justice are important issues to consider with the increase of the human population – the interest in healthier, more sustainable options has grown considerably. Now, more than ever, people want to align their values when making purchasing decisions (Consumer Research Study, IBM 2020). However, besides the lack of options and high prices, we still lack readily available information that help us make these better choices.
User Research
To understand our target audience's behaviors and actions as consumers, I created a survey with 10 questions. 86 people completed the questionnaire and 74% were self-reported conscious consumers. They affirmed that they have changed their habits to incorporate more environmentally-friendly practices, such as recycling and eating less animal products, but believe that they could further improve. Moreover, 70% of participants said that they would use an app to help access the green practices of their food providers.
What Holds Them Back?
Price: In our survey, 58.8% participants affirmed that organic, more sustainable products are too expensive for their pockets.
Lack of Alternatives: 52.9% or survey participants responded that better alternatives are hard to find.
Lack of Information: 29.4% think that readily available information is hard to come by, and 35.3% can’t find the time to search.
“I read products’ labels but when I go to a restaurant, how do I know if the ingredients are ethically sourced? I suppose I could ask but employees rarely know.”
“I go online and read about a company that is being socially irresponsible, I stop buying their products. Next month, I won’t know if those practices have changed. It’d be nice to have a website where I could easily find stuff like that.”
Competitive Analysis
There are many cool apps that organize the world’s food knowledge, however, they are more focused on nutrition analysis, dietary recommendations, and traceability (food animal origin). When they do target product sustainability they aren’t as crowdsourced or as transparent as they can be. Raizama wants to change that.
Raizama
In order to address the needs to easily access food systems practices – from fields to table – and then be able to make better decisions, Raizama is a collaborative platform with the goal of creating greater food transparency by allowing anyone who uses it to find and contribute pertinent information.
Raizama wants to:
Connect consumers with their values and the ones of food producers, food providers & retailers
Disseminate information to consumers in the hope of influencing better individual and food suppliers' behaviors
Facilitate a community that shares the motivation to create a path to a more transparent food system
Improve relationships and partnerships across the food system
What Raizama is not:
A scoring app that recommends products or diets
Personas
After a round of user interviews, I developed two main user personas for Raizama that would guide our process going forward:
User Scenario Mapping
We also needed to ideate around the type of experience that we wanted to provide the business owner user segment. Mapping this user scenario was useful to our discussions around how to engage them with the platform.
User Flows
After gaining insight from personas and revising our ideas and sketches, we built a site-map to outline key user flows:
Interface Design
I had different concepts for the visual design and I was able to test desirability with users. Participants within our target audience preferred colors that evoked nature, ecology, and the Earth. I also infused bright hues to make the UI more friendly and engaging.
Prototype & Usability
Three distinct interactive prototypes - from lower to high fidelity - were built and tested throughout our design journey. I led 5-6 interviews in each round (both in person and, remotely, via Zoom). Users who I met in person used an Android phone to view the prototype. Remote mock-ups were shown through Invision and Figma. After gathering feedback, I synthesized the results, discussed them with the team, and improved the designs.
Solutions
Taking a couple examples from our landing page, check out how the design and usability improved after testing and iterations:
Before: At first glance, 1 of 5 people did not know what the app was about. Testing identified language as clunky and too technical, users thought that the interface was not very friendly-looking and it also felt outdated.
After: A simpler, more friendly UI tested positively with users. Effective summary, placement of labels in lieu of placeholder text, and clear calls to action improved scanning and comprehension.
Before: As pleasing as users found it to be, displaying our eco-labels directly at the search page in our dropdown was taking much space, besides being harder to build.
After: Here we have a more familiar pattern of dropdown that allows multiple search selections whilst saving space, especially when we have more eco-labels to show.
Final Thoughts & Next Steps
Raizama is an awe-inspiring project that is still ongoing. Lots of research and talking with users and organizations are needed to validate the complex and extensive taxonomies that we use in the platform. Especially when those concepts reach global scales, eco-conscious practices and legislations can vary greatly. Designing icons for our eco-labels is also part of our plans.
I learned a lot with my PM and I believe that she also got a better understanding of user-centered design. Engineers taught me to balance desirability with feasibility & viability, and finally, It was gratifying to have been able to work on a project that touches my heart in the desire to create a more sustainable and ethical world, together.