USER RESEARCH

Our team picked farmers markets as our research topic for this project because they are enjoyable, many people go to them, and there are plenty around the Seattle area. We picked the Ballard Farmers Market in Seattle for our user research due to the convenient location and time of the market.

Research at the Farmers Market

I conducted two semi-structured interviews with farmers market customers. Other members of my group conducted interviews with vendors. After some consideration between vendors and customers as our user group, we decided to focus our project on farmers market customers because they had more pain points.

Next, we conducted Walk-A-Mile research where we became customers and walked through the farmers market while interacting with vendors. I bought some honey after sampling different kinds! We also conducted Fly-On-The-Wall observations in which we observed the farmers market without interacting with anyone. These forms of research provided more insight into the behaviors of farmers market customers.

Key Insights from Interviews

Competitive Analysis

I did a competitive analysis on Share Farm, a farmers market app. Based on my analysis, I thought it would be beneficial to focus on the community aspect of farmers markets in our product since that was important to customers based on our research and is not something that was a focus on Share Farm. This can provide a competitive edge to our product. I also found the interface of Share Farm to be cluttered and unintuitive, so those are areas I wanted to improve on in our product.

Personas

Our team picked two customer personas to focus on: a new customer and a customer that is familiar with the farmers market. We picked these two user groups based on our user research demographic.

After getting feedback, we made a final version of our personas.

User Journey Map

We made a user journey map for the experienced shopper persona based on our user research. The user journey map helped us compare pain points through a visual representation of our research insights.

DESIGN QUESTION

How might we mitigate shopper confusion caused by the dynamic nature of information about vendors, products, and the market itself?

DESIGN PROCESS

We made storyboards, an information architecture, and paper prototypes prior to conducting a usability test. After analyzing the results from the usability test, we made wireframes. Prior to making the final designs, we came up with the name of the app, Harvest, and the visual language for the app.

Storyboards

We made storyboards to explore multiple ideas and envision key path scenarios that users would take at a farmers market. We decided that the solution would be a mobile application to allow users to access information about the farmers market anytime. The following are the storyboards I made:

Other team members made storyboards for the following actions:

• Find food from grocery list at the market

• Inform users about seasonal changes at the market

• Give users more information about which vendors will be at the market each week

We decided to move forward with the following features:

Information Architecture

After finalizing the app features, we created an information architecture to decide the app structure. This involved deciding how to group features in the app, which is important for the user experience.

Paper Prototypes and Usability Testing

We had three key tasks for usability testing, and we made paper prototypes for those screens.

We had list view and basket view user flows for Task 2, and I made the paper prototypes for the list view user flow shown below.

We tested the paper prototypes with 5 customers familiar with the Ballard Farmers Market. We picked people who were familiar with the farmers market so that they could let us know whether this app would solve their pain points. We gained some key insights from the usability testing.

Wireframes

After gathering the usability testing insights, we decided to:

• Remove information from the home screen to make it less cluttered and show more prevalent information

• Change some tabs on the main navigation bar to facilitate viewing vendor and product information

• Include a toggle option between the list view and icon view for the grocery list to provide users with options

• Move the settings feature from the main navigation bar at the bottom of the screen to a gear icon at the top of the screen to increase intuitiveness

We brainstormed as a group to determine the general layout of the screen, font sizes, and a few icons.

I have included some wireframes for adding an item to the grocery list and viewing information about products. These are the primary screens that I worked on. The blue dots with numbers indicate the order of steps that the user has to take on the screen to complete the action.

We received positive feedback on our user flow. We also received feedback to increase our font size and fix some alignment issues.

Branding Choices

After evaluating different names for the app, we picked Harvest. The name Harvest is short and memorable while placing importance on the farmers’ contributions to farmers markets, making this an ideal name for this app.

We wanted to make the app feel friendly and welcoming. To accomplish this, we used vibrant colors, flat iconography, and rounded corners. We also used a rounded sans-serif typeface for the main headers to further evoke friendliness while maintaining readability. We used a carrot for the logo because it is easily recognizable, has vibrant colors, and is sold at farmers markets. We made it look like a location pin because one feature on our app is being able to find different farmers market locations, and it added uniqueness to the logo.

As the seasons change, so does product availability in the farmers market. In order to visually represent the concept of seasons changing in a fun and friendly manner, we decided to change the app’s main color scheme to reflect which season it is.

FINAL PROTOTYPE

Incorporating the wireframe feedback and branding choices, we made a final prototype of all the screens using Figma. We also made an interactive prototype using Marvel that shows all screens.

The following are the primary screens that I worked on.

To address the pain point of unclear information about products and their availability, we included a “What’s In Season” section on the market dashboard page. This section changes per season to reflect the produce available. We also included a Products tab with information about the products sold at the market and their availability in the upcoming week.

Through the Grocery List feature, users can create a grocery list to use during their farmers market trip and personalize the information they receive about product availability. Based on usability testing feedback, in which some users preferred the list-based grocery list and others preferred the icon-based grocery list, we included a toggle feature for users to toggle between the list and basket view.