My Role
Time Frame
UX Designer and Researcher
5 weeks
I was inspired to start this project after learning about many major brands and corporations still use exploitative labor and terrible farming practices, despite efforts and media attention protesting against such operations.
Businesses often use globalized supply chains and tracking whether their production is ethical or not can be confusing and tricky.
This realization motivated me to create a tool that simplifies the process, letting consumers make informed, ethical choices and hold companies accountable for their actions and practices.
I decided to ask 17 fellow consumers about their perspectives on ethical shopping.
I asked users about their personal levels of environmental and social awareness, their shopping habits, and the ethics involved in shopping.
Majority of participants did not feel very informed about the products they were buying and did not really trust the brands they bought from.
From these participants, I picked out and interviewed 3 users that fit my target user group: those that consider themselves fairly environmentally conscious.
What I found was:
From the information obtained from the user research, I crafted two personas:
Based off user concerns, I knew there were a few design requirements that had to be incorporated into the solution.
Since one major issue consumers have with ethical shopping is the difficulty of research, I needed to make sure the UI conveyed the necessary information without looking too overwhelming or dense.
I created 4 variations of a possible product page and asked 6 users to select which one they thought was best and why.
4/6 participants preferred pages B and C saying that these pages had the right amount of information and the certification icons made the information seem more legit.
Product page C ultimately won out due to the way the colored fonts broke up blocks of text, making it easier to understand.
After building a low fidelity prototype, I invited 3 users to test out the app and give critique and feedback.
1. Users mentioned how being able to shop brand products by category would be useful
2. Users felt that the search results should be able to filter by price
3. Users also wanted to see the price of products that were listed in search and home
With the feedback in mind, I started designing the final product.
The app allows users to scan a product's barcode and be able to see the product's certifications and brief information about what the label means.
The user is also able to see the prices of the product in different store locations as well as alternative recommendations!
Other features:
Browsing products by category, price, brand.
Search for products and filtering search results.
User reviews.
Brand and certification information.
Stories and news about relevant topics.
This was a project I completed over the summer! Although it is only a concept, I wanted to create a project that would make a difference and help others. I've always been interested in sustainability and ways to consume less in the interest of the environment so this project was very exciting for me to navigate and try to problem solve.
This was the first time I used surveys to get user feedback. I found it quick and convenient but I still prefer interviewing users because I find it provides me with deeper insights and better understanding. I do think I will continue using surveys in the future to poll users for design preferences though!
Since this project was done on my own, I mainly relied on friends, friends of friends, and random Reddit users to provide me with feedback and insights. Because of that, my participants mostly consisted of people in their 20s. I imagine my user research would be a bit different if my demographic expanded to different age groups and was more targeted to a specific user. If I could do this project again, I would try to recruit a larger user group composed of people that deeply care about shopping ethically.