Roots
Focus on CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT, PROJECT MANAGEMENT, and USER RESEARCH skills
DESIGNERS: 3 | TIMELINE: 3 weeks | PLATFORM: Desktop, Mobile | TOOLS: Trello, Whiteboards & Markers, Post-It Notes & Pens, Sketch
THE CLIENT
For our fifth UXDI project at General Assembly, the focus was on collaborating directly with a real startup to apply UX skills to their existing product.
Two classmates and I were the UX Design team working with the founder of NooshTube, a social enterprise on a mission “to help people capture their ancestry through food”.
As a brand, NooshTube’s vision is to create simple tools that empower individuals and families of diverse backgrounds to curate and archive their cultural and family memories through food while ultimately developing a platform for "new food entrepreneurs".
THE OPPORTUNITY
While exploring what NooshTube.com offered, we saw that the website neither offered nor mentioned any functional tools or social networking elements developed for users.
To grow and be successful in the future, we recognized that NooshTube needed to quickly mature beyond a concept by actively developing and releasing proprietary tools for people interested in engaging regularly.
With a deeper understanding of who NooshTube’s users are and what they need, the brand could successfully develop a sustainable relationship with users, first by developing a flagship MVP (minimum viable product) and then by releasing additional related tools and other products or services to meet users’ needs.
With an MVP designed to solve real user problems, we saw potential for the brand to strategically scale up and eventually become the diverse, dynamic social enterprise our client envisioned and communicated to us.
THE HYPOTHESIZED SOLUTION
MY ROLE
- PROJECT MANAGER responsible for timeline development, team task assignments, project progress, and key stakeholder communications
- UX DESIGNER responsible for user research, including conducting user interviews and developing user personas & associated journey maps
PROJECT MANAGEMENT PROCESS
After democratically establishing our individual roles and responsibilities as a team, I developed an internal project plan for the team using Trello Boards to help keep us on-task, on-time, and on the same page throughout the project.
The plan broke each day of the three-week project down into specific action items for each team member to complete.
I am grateful for this opportunity to manage a team project while working directly with an entrepreneur as our client. For me, the experience reinforced the value of flexibility as well as bringing a positive, curious, and open mindset to unexpected challenges. This opportunity additionally gave me a significant amount of practice in both communication and personal organization.
USER RESEARCH PROCESS
We additionally understood that these users' problems include:
We understood from our client that the NooshTube's target users are:
One of our primary objectives while working with with NooshTube's founder was to communicate the importance of using user research data to make the best-possible design decisions for the platform’s first digital tool for users.
To learn as much as possible about our users, we collected interview data from participants both in-person and remotely by either phone or video call.
We additionally developed and distributed an online survey to learn more about the general internet population's interest in food and culture.
We completed an affinity diagram-style exercise to help synthesize our research data where, together in a conference room, we reviewed participant responses from all 15 user interviews.
As we read, we copied standout words or phrases from the data onto individual Post-It notes and hung them on whiteboards.
Together we were quickly able to group similar Post-It notes together and effectively identify trends in the user interview data.
As the team member responsible for communicating our product's user narratives, I synthesized the trends we identified into a series of User Personas and associated User Journey Maps for our client's use.
These deliverables were designed to inspire empathy and create clarity for the NooshTube team, in terms of who its users are as well as what they want and need when it comes to managing recipes and related information. Insights from these deliverables can be useful in making effective brand and product decisions moving forward.
Please take a moment to explore all of the User Personas and associated Journey Maps developed for this project.
CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY & BRAND DEVELOPMENT
I collaborated with my teammate in charge of the project’s visual design elements to conduct contextual inquires with 25 total users on NooshTube's key brand elements.
The goal of this research was to both validate the brand components that worked well for users and identify elements working against the brand.
We showed each participant NooshTube’s name, then the NooshTube logo, and finally the existing website components. At each stage of this process, we recorded their impressions as data.
From these research results, we gained a number of key insights into the types of changes that would most positively impact users' experience of the platform as a brand.
Our findings led us to recommended the adoption of a new brand name, "Roots", along with a completely redesigned visual identity.
We chose "Roots" as the platform's new brand name because two of the word's many definitions particularly speak to its vision of connecting people through food and culture.
For many people, their "roots" are their family, ethnic, or cultural origins. The word can additionally refer to "any plant grown for its edible root", like carrots or beets.
MVP Tool Concept: Roots Recipes
Add Recipe, Desktop Layout
Recipe Detail, Desktop Layout
User Profile, Desktop Layout
The flagship digital tool we designed to solve users’ primary problems with storing and sharing recipes is Roots Recipes, an application that is both desktop- and mobile-friendly.
Because attractive images of food were identified as a desirable experience for users, a recommended feature concept for the Roots Mobile experience is the Food Photo Guide.
This mobile-first tool should be designed to optimize users' experience of capturing and sharing aesthetically-pleasing images of food.
Add Recipe, Mobile Layout
Recipe Detail, Mobile Layout
User Profile, Mobile Layout
NEXT STEPS
Moving forward, I recommend developing wireframes for additional Roots Recipes pages and creating a clickable prototype of the recipe creation process.
This prototype can be used to conduct user testing of Roots Recipes, the results of which should inform future product iterations.
I also recommend conducting additional user research to support the development of “Roots Stories” as a future product concept. This is a complementary tool to “Roots Recipes” that enables users to store and manage information about their family stories, heritage, traditions, and culture alongside their recipes.