Bloom
Our team was tasked with creating a product that helped a social cause of our choosing. After discussion, our group found a common interest and concern around local food access after witnessing empty grocery store shelves for months in our communities during the covid-19 pandemic.
Tools Used: Affinity Designer, Adobe Suite, Figma, Maze, Miro
Role: Team of 3, Project Lead/UX Designer
Timeline: 2 week sprint
Been Here Before…
Just after finishing my Industrial Design undergrad program at the University of Cincinnati, I packed up my car and drove 2.5 hours east, into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
Athens, Ohio is a small town, hours from the nearest big city. The area is known as a food desert: residents have very few options as to where they can get fresh groceries, and because many residents are living under the poverty line, even when the store is stocked, they might not be able to afford good produce. In Athens, I worked on a small non-profit farm, growing everything from peppers to zucchini, and everything we grew was donated to local food shelters, helping ease some of the difficulties of access to fresh food in the community.
Years later, when covid-19 hit, and store shelves began emptying out, I was struck by the similarities we were suddenly facing on a country-wide scale to what Athens, Ohio has been dealing with for decades.
There has to be a better way.
Gather
We researched how people shop for groceries currently, what their pain points might be, and how they’d like to shop in an ideal world.
Grow
After looking at how people shop and how they’d like to shop, we took our findings and began looking at how to connect people with their locally grown produce.
Flourish
We created a unique app that we hope will help connect users with their local community, vendors and produce, relying less on big-box suppliers.
Our Process
Screener Survey
We created a survey to get an initial look at how people currently grocery shop and how they might like to shop in an ideal world.
85% of participants said they usually shop at big-box stores for groceries. (Kroger, Walmart, etc.) because the location and hours were convenient for them.
A smaller percentage also mentioned that they didn’t want to have to worry about items being out of stock or hard to find, and trusted that their local store would have what they were looking for.
Interestingly, when asked where they’d ideally like to shop for groceries, 80% mentioned farmer’s markets, local shops, and a desire for their habits to be more environmentally sustainable.
Interviews
To understand the motivation of our survey participants better, we talked to three of them about their answers, and explored how they felt about their grocery shopping habits.
While they all expressed how fun and exciting Farmer’s Markets are, and how boring they found everyday shopping to be, all three mentioned that they were intimidated by their lack of knowledge when at Farmer’s Markets. Prices, vendor lists, and the location/schedule of Farmer’s Markets are often hard to come by. Two of our participants said that they stumble on Farmer’s Markets more often than they plan on going to them.
However, I noticed a connection between all three participants: once at a Farmer’s Market, all three felt freer to experiment and try new things, and felt a deeper connection to their community just by walking around and speaking to vendors.
In short, farmer’s markets are food and community '“safe spaces” in a way that “regular” grocery stores aren’t.
Gather: Research
Persona + Journey Map
From our findings, we meet Camilla: a recent transplant to Austin, TX who is eager to get involved in her new community, and who loves discovering new local shops, but doesn’t really know how to get started.
We wanted to highlight how much Camilla knows about shopping locally in her old neighborhood, and how she wants to engage with her new community, but she feels shy or uncertain in her new environment:
How might we help Camilla connect with her community and shop more locally in a more convenient way, without the intimidating aspects commonly associated with farmer’s markets?
An Informational + Social App
It was clear to us at this point that our users needed an app on their phone, rather than a website.
We knew our target audience was looking for something they could take with them while exploring the city they lived in, or just an easy way to connect with farmer’s markets or vendors they stumble on in the course of their day.
User Flow
We had many conversations about how to structure our app, (and several different user flows!) eventually deciding we wanted to put both farmer’s markets and individual vendors on the same level of importance so that users could find information in more than one way.
Our ideal path allows users to discover, follow, and find the locations of markets and vendors they’re interested in, all without having to leave the app.
Grow: Design
I built the medium fidelity prototype that we would eventually test with, focusing on very rounded shapes that felt soft and friendly, as well as making buttons large and easy to spot for users who were in motion; either walking or on public transport to the market or vendor of their choice.
I took inspiration from apps users would be familiar with that they also might associate with food, friends, and community like GrubHub, DoorDash, Uber, and Google Maps.
We had users test three tasks:
Find a farmer’s market that sells a specific good (in this case, honey).
Search for your nearest farmer’s market, and get directions to that location.
Connect with that same farmer’s market for future updates.
Testing was… mostly a success! Feedback we received included:
Up the contrast on the design (oops!)
Make sure all features were worded consistently throughout prototype (in this case “connect with” in our question to follow specific markets didn’t line up with our “add to favorites” feature within the prototype.)
Otherwise, users liked the big, clear visual design and felt excited about the idea of the app itself, which was fun for the team to hear as we finalized our design!
My teammates Daniel and Alysia put together a brand around Bloom, using our mid-fi as the base of the later design. They took inspiration from actual farmer’s markets with earthy, green and brown tones that were comforting and familiar.
Our logo for Bloom is based on a mosaic we found - while the mosaic is flowery and based in nature, the pixelated effect of the tiles reminded us of the tech behind Bloom, and we loved the idea of the two coming together.
We began calling our prototype “Bloom” as we put together ideas for what the hi-fidelity prototype would look like. We wanted users like Camilla to be able to use the app and “bloom” outside of their comfort zone.
Flourish: Hi-Fidelity and Next Steps
Our hi-fidelity prototype features a high-contrast, soft-edged design that our second round of users found approachable and clear to use.
Many were excited by the prospect of this app, and mentioned how much easier shopping locally would be with this app in their pockets.
Next Steps
We’re excited about the potential of Bloom, but we know that having an app connecting folks to their local farmer’s markets is only the beginning. In the future, we’d like to expand on our concept in the following ways:
Social Aspect:
While users can currently like and follow farmer’s markets and vendors they like, many of the folks we surveyed mentioned how intimidating going to a new farmer’s market alone is for them. Can Bloom connect folks all heading to the same market? What might that look like?
Environmental Education:
Folks we talked to who regularly shop at farmer’s markets tended to be somewhat knowledgeable about their local economy, environmental footprint, and their impact on both - how might Bloom expand in the future to also help educate people who might be interested in these topics but don’t know how to start looking?