goal
To help create brand identity, e-commerce responsive web app & help increase accessibility to dairy free alternatives and build a community to increase awareness around the benefits of having dairy-free diet.
Role - UX Designer
TIMELINE - May 2022 - present
Tools - Adobe XD, Illustrator, Photoshop
APPROACH
Employed the design thinking process to empathize, define, ideate, prototype & test solutions for creating an effective online responsive web app. The process was carried out in the following phases product definition, research, analysis, design & validation.
Understand the user
USER RESEARCH
As the product is in the brainstorming stage, I decided to conduct a foundational research to empathize with users, understand their needs, and inspire new design directions and priorities. Hence I used interviews, surveys & competitive audit as research methods to conduct foundational research based on qualitative observations. This helped me discover the following pain points:
1 Dairy-free products available only at few locations in the city making it not accessible for majority of people.
2 Lack of awareness on health benefits of using dairy-free products.
3 Very few to none brands selling these products in most regions apart from big cities.
4 No home delivery options to get these products.
5 All products available on the market contain preservatives, no fresh dairy-free products int the market.
6 Most current consumers are people with allergies or people who have moved to vegan diet.
I also conducted a competitive analysis and to better understand the market for dairy alternatives before starting the design process.
Macro Forces
Then I identified the internal and external constraints that may impact the design and products.
Personas
Based on the research insights and pain points, there were 2 main user personas that the app needed to solve the problem for. The idea was to understand users within their social, emotional and physical context.
USER PROBLEM STATEMENTS
Creating personas helped to draw up problem statements to clearly define user needs that should be addressed. For example, for Noor Patel the problem statement read as :
Noor Patel is a full time lawyer and a mother who needs an easy experience to home deliver dairy-free products because she is allergic to dairy and needs a comfortable way to adjust to these new dietary restrictions within her busy routine.
Goal statements
Based on the above user research and analysis, I understood what were the problem users were facing. And the next step was developing goal statements to streamline the product development process.
•Create hassle free, easy to access online ordering platform.
•Incorporate opportunities for community discussions and forums.
•Increase the product range to compete against all things dairy.
•Provide one stop platform for consumers, wholesalers and plant based community.
•Brand in order to attract the gen-z with modern, fun, cool & inviting feel.
•Market and brand to increase popularity of using plant-based products.
•Create a product that can compete in the market, improve sales, and increase customer satisfaction.
Site MAP
At this early stage, the information architecture of the website had to be organized to help users understand where they are in a product and where the information they want is. To do so, I used a hierarchical site map to clearly define the home page, parent pages & child pages.
DESIGN
wireframe
To understand the content/information relationship & priorities, wireframes options for the homepage, item info page, products page were detailed out. I also conducted risk analysis to map out potential risks and actions that can be taken early on.
Low-fidelity prototype
After creating wireframes, I started creating LoFi prototypes. The main consideration was to keep a very simple organization of the content with minimal design blocks.
UI kiT and Branding
After the wireframes were ready, it was time to figure out the branding of the products and the platform. As per the client's suggestion and user research, the approach was to make an inviting, minimal and sophisticated looking platform. With these criteria, I designed the typography, product packaging ideas, logo design, iconography, color palette, buttons and content cards.
HI-fidelity PROTOTYPE
After creating LoFi prototypes, UI Kit and mockups, I created HiFi prototype. You can view the prototype here.
