Eat Better
Eat Better is my final major project from my User Experience Design MA at University of Arts London. I collaborated on this project with one other student (Byron Sin), we received a Distinction.
MY ROLE
Masters UX Design Student
METHODS USED
Research, Testing, Modelmaking, Prototyping, Design Iteration, Design Delivery
The Brief
A project focussing on allotments and city farming, revolving around the theme of sustainable living and the potential for improving the way we purchase and consume food.
Research
Primary & Secondary Methods
Following online and book based research, I contacted and visited people with allotments, conducting in depth interviews and photographic analysis. Transcribing the interviews, I looked at the key takeaways from what each participant picked out.
After the interviews, I spoke with the founder of a company called Green Lab, an open innovation lab and ecosystem for individuals and organisations to design sustainable solutions to complex urban food. He advised me to look in the direction of changing the way supermarkets provide foods and how that could become more sustainable.
This led me to create a survey to appreciate how people shop and why they make the choices they do. I wanted to know whether people considered the environmental impact their shopping habits have
Idea Development
It was at this point Byron and I started collaborating on the project, we started looking at the idea of merging vegetable delivery companies into one service, allowing users to buy in season produce, we started considering the idea journey.
We were trying to create a unique system that would encourage people to understand and purchase in season produce, as from the survey results I received, people weren't at all focussed on the environmental impact of food they bought. We progressed our initial idea journey on real time board to break down each section further.
Developing our idea further, we created a 'How Might We' diagram to show all of the individual problems we wanted to tackle with our design and the touch points we must consider.
Idea Testing
Our idea was now to encourage people to understand the environmental impact the food they buy has, and to purchase in season produce. To test our idea, we wanted to see if people understood what foods were in season and if not then where they come from, so we created some games to test this.
This was very useful as a testing method, it was very conclusive that many people didn't know what was in season and how far things travelled when out of season, it was also nice to see the shocked reactions when they found out the answers.
The Design
Design Idea Models
For our degree show we wanted to have models to represent our initial idea, providing people a greater understanding of our process. We created three boxes showing product journeys and the environmental impact of them.
Design Development
To start our final design development we made a diagram breaking down our idea to use for reference when designing each aspect. We had decided to design an application, new shelving and branding for Sainsbury's to get people to purchase in season produce and carbon offset for the out of season products they purchase.
We moved on to designing the wireframes for the interface of our idea, thinking about how people would be on boarded and remain engaged with the idea.
With our wireframing complete, we moved it over to Sketch and started developing the colours and the consistencies of the design. We wanted it to still have the feel of being in tangent with Sainsbury's, but not so much that our idea lost its identity.
While designing our interface for the prototype, using Sketch I created a user experience journey map to visualise how users would feel at each stage when interacting with our design online and in store.
With our application design being nearly finished, I used Illustrator to design a storyboard that would represent our final concept video of how users would use our Eat Better system.
The foundation for our final prototype was completed and we needed to test out what colours and iconography worked best for displaying the products in store and online. Gaining feedback helped us greatly in understanding what we needed to change within our design brand guidelines.
Final Design Video
With all our elements designed and made, I started taking all of our work into Principle to animate it and prototype it for our final video. We initially wanted to film in Sainsbury's but we weren't allowed to, so I made splash screens in Principle and exported them as video files so that we could have written information alongside the application prototype.
In addition to our prototype video we had also made displays to represent in store labelling. The codes on the boxes would lead the users to product information pages that we had prototyped using In Vision. This was to be displayed with our video in our degree show.
