Overview

Ruminate is a nonprofit innovation hub operating out of Grand Rapids, MI. They provide consulting, testing, and service design services for entities that are contributing to a sustainable food system. Ruminate wants to “drive change by demystifying food system issues” and by making information more accessible to those serving the food system. One way they do this is by helping small ethical, equitable, and environmentally sustainable food producers evaluate their products through data and expert consultation.

Presently, testing new product ideas for the food industry lacks structure and requires small businesses to spend a lot of time and energy. Ruminate wants to digitize services for their customers, allowing more room for streamlined product evaluations. Our team helped Ruminate design, test, code, and prepare to launch a new platform that helps small food businesses test and evolve new product ideas.

The Challenge

Small food producers contributing to a more ethical, equitable, and environmentally sustainable food system lack the resources to conduct product research and development.

• Traditional consulting firms: often prohibitively expensive.

• University-supported innovation labs: not tailored to sustainable food business.

• entities; offer infrequent or one-time support: bound by geographic constraint.

• Casual/informal feedback from network: unstructured feedback or of limited scope.

Possible Solution

Design a platform that helps connect value-based food producers to evaluators. Feedback provides timely, comprehensive, consistent & iterative product evaluation. The Feedback platform will aid small value-focused producers in adapting to market trends, making informed decisions, increasing sales, improving products, producing more robust product lines, and expanding to new markets.

Agile Process

Feature Requirements from Stakeholders

• User Generate Profiles + Accounts

• Automated matching of evaluators to producers

• Automated and tracking of shipping information

• Check out page for paying for product evaluations/ Selecting of evaluation packages

• Producer dashboard with sections for starting evaluation, current evaluations, and past evaluations.

• Evaluator dashboard with sections for starting evaluation, current evaluations, and past evaluations.

Feedback from Development Team

The features list was discussed with the development team for the scope of the 8-week project, and the automatic matching of evaluators to producers was not obtainable in this MVP, as it required advanced knowledge of AI/ML. Based on this, the team strategized and started with the new direction of selecting evaluators based on the evaluator's credentials and availability.

Seeking Potential Users’ Behaviors and Pain points

User Interviews

Ruminate previously conducted research and interviewed its potential food producers with the initial pilot project as the Monger/Maker project. Our research team analyzed their results via affinity mapping and highlighted possible user pain points and needs.
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My Role: Participated in the job-to-be-done exercise, and contributed How-Might-We solutions for potential user problems.

Based on the affinity mapping and insights following user problems were drawn.

• Lack of standardized process for producers to request an evaluation

• No indicators for producers to know the progress of an evaluation or status unless they contact the evaluators directly, which is time-consuming

• Lack of organized location/database to identify past evaluation/no history

• A mismatch between the producer’s request and evaluator’s product expertise and level

• The effort from producers to reach out to evaluators (time-consuming process)

• Producers had to take initiative to remind evaluators(not time efficient)

• No way for producers to know the availability of evaluators

Who’s Using Feedback?

User personas were developed by the Research team, based on the insights and findings from the user interviews and stakeholder feedback. The team referred to these artifacts throughout the project to lead the design direction of the MVP.‍

My role: Examined the personas with the Design team and discussed the findings with the research team. I designed with each persona in mind.

User Journey maps were created based on the insights from the user interviews and personas for producers and evaluators, to give us a better understanding of the user’s needs and to ideate on any potential issues that may arise in a given scenario.

My Role: Reviewed with the Design team to incorporate opportunities within the scope of this phase of the project and list opportunities for the next.

How Will Users Navigate Feedback?

With the feature requirements from clients, the design team started working on a jobs to be done (JTBD) exercise. We collaborated cross-functionally with the Product Strategy and Research teams and participated in a "how might we" exercise to come up with a list of features and categories to develop user flows, the sitemap, and the information architecture of the platform navigation.

Main categories are

• Choosing evaluators based on their credentials by producer

• Pricing options

• How to use the platform

• Create a profile and upload the necessary documents

• Create a profile and upload the necessary documents

• Landing page

• Evaluation status

• Post Evaluation results

• Payments

User flows were created based on the customer journey map developed by the strategy team. These deliverables aided the team to immerse ourselves in the users’ challenges and emotions as they attempt to accomplish tasks within the platform.

My Role: The team and I used the user flows to dictate what pages to design and the elements and features that needed to be included to complete a specific task.

The design team developed an initial site map based on the feature requirements and the current Ruminate sitemap provided by the client. The initial sitemap was tested by the Research team in two rounds of card sorting, one open and one closed to develop the final sitemap.

My Role: Participated in the development of the original sitemap, and reached out to my network to complete the card sorting exercise.

Capturing Ideas On Paper

Equipped with the user flows and site map, the Design team conducted a crazy 8’s session. We based our initial designs on producers choosing evaluators contingent on their credentials, availability, and industry sector.
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My Role: Participated in the crazy 8’s session, and dot voted on the best design solutions to develop into lo-fi wireframes.

Challenge: Due to the agile timeline, we presented a low-fidelity design of a task flow, where producers were allowed to select the evaluators. The clients did not like the option, as they were envisioning an unbiased evaluation process. In response, the Design team developed wireframes that explained to the user that evaluators will be assigned by availability and location (location for an extra fee) and met with the clients to present new solutions.

Low-Fi designs for selecting evaluators

Testing, Testing...

After iterating and getting client feedback, the Design team started prototyping and preparing for usability testing feedback. We first started with low-fidelity wireframes, moved to mid-fidelity wireframes for the first round of usability testing, and then high-fidelity for the second round of usability testing. Preference testing was conducted to finalize the color palette.

Main pages designed by the design team for this phase:

• Registering as a Producer and Evaluator

• Landing page

• Pricing page

• Producer and Evaluator Dashboards

• Evaluation forms

• Checkout page

• Payment Confirmation

• Onboarding

• User Profile

• User Profile

• Evaluation Results page

• Product intake form

• Evaluation status/info page

• Admin page

My Role: I designed the checkout page, payment confirmation, onboarding, user profile, and UI elements. Prototyped the wireframes for testing.

Low - Mid Fidelity Wireframes

Challenge: Due to further testing needed for the entry timing, the onboarding process was out of scope and pushed to the second phase of the project. At the time of this project, I designed low-fi wireframes.

Mid-fidelity Usability Testing

The Research team conducted remote-moderated usability testing on mid-fidelity designs with four participants, giving them four scenario tasks to complete in the prototype. The goal was to observe their behaviors and process and identify any points of friction or confusion.

Flows tested

• Signup for producers and evaluators

• Starting and completing an evaluation

• Status of evaluation request

Results

The overall flow was easy to understand by the users. Users appreciated the simple designs and the forms general feedback was good. We used Jakob Nielsen’s error of severity rating scale, to identify what participant observations and problems were most severe and where the Design team should focus their efforts.

Client Concerns

Ruminate initially supplied a lengthy producer sign-up form, with the thought that a user would complete the form due to invested time. However, 2 participants mentioned that the forms and questions were lengthy. After pairing with the Research team, we approached the client with our findings and they agreed to shorten the form and relocate the information to be accessed via their profile.

Solution to insight 3

Hi-fidelity Usability Testing

Insights from the mid-fidelity usability testing were implemented, and the second round of remote-moderated usability tests was conducted with 6 participants. Two of which were current Ruminate users (one producer & one evaluator).

Flows tested

• Signup for producers and evaluators

• Starting and completing an evaluation request by producers and evaluators

• Status of evaluation request

• Viewing of the final evaluation results

Results

The overall usability, navigation, colors, and simplicity of the designs were enjoyed by the participants and Ruminate. There were no major errors identified, so the Design team focused on the key takeaways. The suggestions from this round of testing will be implemented in the second phase of the project beginning in October 2022.

Reflection

It was a pleasure collaborating on the Ruminate ‘Feedback’ project, and I am very proud to represent the Tech Fleet team. It is empowering to help small sustainable business owners create accessible products! This project taught me so much, including:

Takeaways

• Fail fast and often! The agile timeline played a significant role in the iteration process and receiving feedback from the stakeholders, for example, nixing the feature where producers were able to choose evaluators. This idea went in a completely different direction from what the client wanted, but it was pivotal to receive feedback so early in the process and to be able to quickly change the lo-fi wireframes.

• Communicate design ideas frequently and efficiently. Working with a remote team worldwide called for open communication and aligned goals. Communicating any changes, blocks, etc in daily standups was to be shared advantageously.

• How to receive and provide constructive feedback during weekly meetings with the cross-functional teams and stakeholders. Together our team discussed our decision-making process, refined our prototypes, and explored new ideas.

Further Development

• Without the contract time constraint, I would have had more time to further develop the MVP and assist in Beta testing.

• Conduct Usability Testing. Due to the make-up of the teams, I was not as heavily involved in the testing process. In the next phase of the project, I would like to be present during testing and work with actual Feedback users.

• Aid in the development of the ‘Feedback’ Design System. A design system is alive! I would love to be able to develop the design language and work with UI elements to create a memorable experience and add more joy to tedious forms etc.