What are dog owner's main motivations and pain points around their dog's treats?
What barriers keep dog owners from trying insect-based food?
Our clients had never engaged with a user experience team before, so we decided to include them in the sessions that generated our problem statement, user journeys, and initial sketches. To stimulate our ideation process, we created a high-level journey map that captured all customer interactions involved in purchasing dog treats. By time boxing and keeping it concise, we identified key touch points where we could potentially integrate our solution.
“I wish we had done this sooner. We have been so focused on the business side, that we haven’t had an opportunity to look into the customer side.”
- Mallory Morse, Co-Founder of Just Rite Bite
We needed to communicate the nutritional effects of insect based food and we also needed to overcome user's gut instincts that insects were "icky." For our prototype, we decided to explore how gamification could increase how users retained new educational concepts, like new ideas about nutrition. We also wanted to explore how friendly character design could familiarize users with insect-based ingredients, like we had found in our literature review.
Our prototype, therefore, teaches users facts about insect-based dog treats through two methods: educational minigames through an app experience, and factoids displayed on physical, collectible cards.
To test whether our cards-plus-minigames idea would solve the problem of educating and socializing users to insect-based pet food, we conducted four concept validation tests. Using body-storming, we roleplayed a scenario at JRB’s farmer’s market stand where users would encounter collectible cards and use them to open a web app featuring 7 different minigames (represented as a paper prototype). Our initial findings were that users would be interested in trying the experience, but that the experience had to be convenient and highly engaging.
The ideation workshops that we ran with our stakeholders helped explain the design process to them and really get them on board with the end product. I have continued to do on projects where my team hasn't worked with UX designers before.
In terms of what we could have improved: validating our design concept with a large-N survey could give us more confidence that many people would want to participate in our experience, as well as roleplaying with a more varied set of dog owners (income, dog health needs, etc.)