The Ethical Shopper
Empowering users to become responsible consumers: an approachable solution to an urgent problem
Solo // Oct 2022 // 1 week // Concept Project // Citizen-tech
Role: UX/UI Designer & Researcher
Tools & Methods: Double-Diamond Method, Figma, Zoom, Slack, Pitch, Pen & Paper!
— Brief
You will be paired with a partner to discuss problems that you encounter in your everyday life and need a solution to. You will aim to simply and effectively: discover, define and ultimately seek to resolve your partner’s problem - using your newfound knowledge of UX processes, to build a simple mobile app solution.
My user’s problem:
With this brief in mind, my partner came to me with her problem. It was multi-faceted but centered around her concern over waste when food shopping (food and packaging) and how it influenced her food purchasing decisions. Connie explained that her sensitivity to the topic had been spurred by her personal reading and interest in the waste disposal system in the UK.
Having had this initial conversation, my understanding was that my partner needed a greater sense of transparency and knowledge of the content of the products she was purchasing, as well as their subsequent ‘waste disposal journey’ in order to better inform her purchasing decisions.
— Process
01/ Understand the user
Conducted interviews with users to understand their needs, behaviours and attitudes around:
Purchasing food.
Food waste.
Their hacks/solutions to allow them to shop in a responsible fashion.
Synthesised the insights into 3 main themes:
Food packaging & provenance of food.
Lack of transparency in the food waste management chain leads to a feeling of frustration and helplessness.
Education & public awareness to responsible food waste management.
02/ Identify the problem
Created a persona (Connie T.) based on my research to help empathise with the user.
Created a new persona (Oscar P.) after carrying out more user interviews in order to refine my approach to the problem. I integrated more insights into the persona:
Users are concerned about food waste management for environmental reasons, but also for financial reasons. They felt like they were throwing money away whenever they threw food away (over-consumption).
Although they were concerned about the environment, users admitted they felt they could do better in their efforts to be more responsible consumers.
Problem: “Oscar P. needs to know the provenance of the food she buys and what happens to her waste so that she can be a more responsible consumer and is able to to make more informed purchasing decisions.”
➡️ How might we provide Oscar P. with a way of verifying that the food goods she purchases are ethical and will have the least detrimental impact on the environment?
03/ Ideate Solutions & Test
Realised that the user may have minimal control over what happens to their waste after they’ve thrown it out, but they can control the amount and types of waste they generate before it is thrown out.
The overall solution was to empower Oscar to BUY LESS and BUY BETTER.
Decided on 2 ideas to explore in order to help Connie T. achieve this:
The ethical shop locator (give the user the ability to locate shops that match their level of ethics).
The ethical product scanner (give the user the ability to know the ethical level of an individual food product).
— Outcome
I designed and tested the 2 initial solutions and came up with 2 more during the usability testing phase:
The ethical shop locator.
The ethical product scanner.
A shopping list functionality in order to allow users to buy just what they need when food shopping.
A food waste management hacks functionality, where users can access tips, articles, links to grass-roots/local citizen initiatives to pressure key stakeholders in the food waste management chain to do better.
— View the Demo
