Project Overview

SlaveFreeTrade is a Swiss-based NGO. Its mission is to bring transparency and improve human rights conditions in workplaces worldwide. The NGO needed help to test the concept and design a new product – an app that would encourage users to campaign against the distribution of products made in slavery.

Problem Statement

The client's objective was to spread awareness and increase active public participation in condemning the unethical workplace practices used by many global trade companies.

HIGH-LEVEL GOALS

• Learn how to spur action from awareness.
• Understand how to drive consumer demand to promote companies' participation in the client's network.
• Develop a tool to help consumers start and effectively spread campaigns on social media.

Users

We identified and focused on two user groups as the primary audience for the MVP (minimum viable product):

• Ethical consumers

• Influencers

Based on the research, we assumed that those two groups would be the driving force behind the mission to change general consumer behavior and animate the general public to participate by spreading the awareness online.

Role & Responsibilities

Team

Responsibilities

• Academic literature research to guide and support the development of the new product by answering foundational questions, such as:
• ~What motivates people to consume ethically?
• ~What motivates people to get actively involved in a cause?
• User research:
• ~Interviews
• ~Surveys
• ~Data analysis, data synthesis
• ~Infer design implications.
• Ideation.
• Prototype testing.

Scope & Constraints

Scope

We worked in weekly Design Sprints for over 12 weeks. Moving from discovery to delivery and we concluded nine distinct tasks. Some tasks were spanning a couple of weeks, some overlapped the same week:

1. Competitive Analysis
2. Stakeholders Interviews
3. Discovery User Interviews
4. Survey
5. Card Sort
6. Research Analysis
7. MVP Scope Definition & Ideation
8. Prototyping
9. Testing.

Constraints

The nature of the project was explorative. From the standpoint of research, our task was to discover how the Freedomer app could fit into the client’s bigger vision – developing a product that serves as a:

Process

We followed an agile development process that consisted of an entire design cycle in a week. A fail fast, learn fast process allows you to test and validate ideas, learn from test results, come up with more new ideas, and present the results to stakeholders every working week.

I will go through the complete process in the following steps, breaking it down into Research, Design, and Test phases. And though every stage included all three elements, I will separate them into distinct sections to enhance clarity.

Research

Stakeholder Interviews

We conducted stakeholder interviews, four in total, to learn about the NGO, its mission, and goals.

Comparative Analysis

Goals

• Understand the competitive space.
• Uncover design opportunities.
• Estimate the competitive edge for the product.

What we learned

We compared 15+ products that helped identify the strengths and weaknesses of the existing products and clarify some key features for the Freedomer App.

Secondary Research

Goals

• Research literature on the topics of political and ethical consumerism.
• Learn how logos and products certifications influence consumer habits.

My contribution

Carried out the literature research, distilled the data, and presented results to the team and the client in the demo meeting.

What we learned

Analysis of empirical research revealed a conundrum that despite significant growth in public awareness of the issues such as animal welfare, climate change, or stark differences in working conditions across the globe, it is not translating into purchasing behavior.

Everyday consumption practices are still heavily driven by factors such as convenience and habit. More importantly, these factors will most likely be resistant to change.

Some of the most common barriers to changing consumer habits are:

Another idea grounded in the empirical research that can be adopted when designing the application for SlaveFreeTrade is to allow users more control over the information flow. Based on the notion that:

1. Individual preferences for managing and processing information vary.
2. The need for information changes based on the information that has already presented itself.

Giving the users more control over what information they see addresses these needs and, according to research, positively impacts the ability of users to understand and remember the information.

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

• Consumer habits are guided by habit, convenience, and value.
• Consumers face significant barriers when trying to follow their ethical intentions.
• Understanding the different needs of consumer types can help design more efficient solutions.
• Allowing for more individual control over the information management can help users process and understand the information and increase the usefulness of the product's usefulness over time.

Go here to see the complete report.

User Research

User Interviews

We ran nine remote user interviews.

We recruited participants via online social networks (such as LinkedIn, Facebook) using a survey screener to select participants for a 45 min interview. The selected participants were offered a monetary incentive to participate.

The main question to select participants was: Have you ever sought out to purchase something made with ethical standards?

GOALS

• Learn about ethical consumers’ habits.
• Learn what motivates them to act.
• Lear about their conception of “modern slavery”.

MY CONTRIBUTION

• Collaborated on creating interview scripts.
• Took notes during the interviews.
• Compiled notes into summaries.
• Presented a written report of summaries to the team.

WHAT WE LEARNED

Card Sort

We conducted a card sorting asking participants (10 in total) to rate product attributes. Participants had to sort attributes into three categories of personal importance: top, medium, or not important.

Product attributes such as:

• Price
• Quality
• Brand
• Manufacturing standards.

Goals

• Assess how specific product qualities dictate purchasing decisions.
• Learn what product attributes are important for the ethical consumer-type users.

what we learned

Price, convenience, and quality – from most to least important – are the essential selling points for any product. Most consumers won't go out of their way to purchase an ethical product if it's not competitive on the market.

Survey

The survey consisted of 16 questions (excluding personal details and demographics)  targeting a more broad audience than only ethical consumers. We distributed the online survey via social media channels resulting in 19 responses from consumers across the world but with the majority residing in the United States.

We measured "ethical consumers" as people who have purposefully purchased something made with ethical standards in the past 12 months.

Goals

• Validate the assumptions we’ve formed from interviews with ethical consumers.
• Understand how consumers define the notion of “modern slavery”.
• Learn what barriers (if any) do ethical consumers face when researching the products.
• Explore why some consumers are less motivated to consume ethically.
• Compare the traits of more motivated consumers to those who are less motivated to consume ethically.
• Uncover areas of opportunity for value proposition in the campaign app to cater to the full spectrum of consumers.

My contribution

Collaborated on creating survey questions referencing literature research and results from the interviews.

what we learned

Out of total 19 responses 15 were identified as ethical consumers. Leaving us unable to reliably compare traits between general type and ethical type consumers.

Insights:

• The primary reason for not buying products with ethical standards is not thinking about the issue when making purchases.
• Ethical consumers state to have joined more campaigns than the less ethical consumers.
• General consumers do not think that their purchases impact environmental causes or issues of modern slavery.
• Both consumer types would join a campaign to stop unethical manufacturing practices.

Although the survey didn’t yield the results, we hoped to get in terms of a general consumer type it was a valuable tool to further the research and confirm the existing demand for the product we were envisioning.

Limitations:

• Only 4 participants identified as a general consumer type.
• The unmoderated nature of the survey does not allow us to infer the reasoning behind the answers.

Affinity Mapping

We organized all the key results from the interviews, card sort, and survey on the virtual whiteboard to identify patterns, uncover insights, and draw conclusions in a team session.

Go here to view in a new tab.

Research Conclusions

First, we created a table with results from the affinity map and concluded design implications.

Next, we prioritized the implications using the MoSCoW method. Categorizing them into must do, should do, could do, won’t do.

Lastly, we derived the key problem statements for the design stage of the project following the how might we (HMW)  structure:

• HMW help users overcome the convenience factor involved in social justice movements for modern slavery?
• HMW remove the barriers for people to join modern slavery campaigns?
• HMW incentivize people to act on campaigns and to continue engaging with the product?
• HMW allows influencers to spread awareness and action to other consumers about modern slavery campaigns?

Go here to view in a new tab.

My contribution

Collaborated on all aspects of results analysis, synthesis, and design implications development.

Personas and User Journey Maps

We identified three user types based on user research results and created user journey maps for each type.

Design

Solutions Ideation & Sketching

We split into three groups, each focused on sketching ideas for one HMW problem.

Team 1: How might we incentivize and motivate people to create and join campaigns?
Team 2: How might we make it easy for influencers to influence ethical consumers with high and low motivation?
Team 3: How might we reward users who start or join a campaign?

Go here to view in a new tab.

My contribution

I worked on the 3rd team, tackling the HMW reward the users for joining the campaign problem.

Wireframing & Prototyping

The design team got busy creating the solutions as wireframes and prototypes using the above results as their guide lines.

Below you can browse through different wireframe flows in the shared Figma file.

Usability Test

We set out to create and run moderated usability sessions with design prototypes following the design phase. This was the final stage of the project that led to conclusions from the test results, recommendations for further iterations, and delivery to the client.

goals

• Validate the value and concept of the product of the app with users.
• Uncover areas of opportunity for improvement
• Identify confusing, counter logical design.

my contribution

• Collaborated in developing the structure and script of the usability sessions.
• Assisted in running a pilot test.
• Notetaker for 1 out of 3 sessions.
• Wrote reports from video material and notes.

what we learned

After running a pilot test, we completed three 1:1 remote moderated usability sessions. The participants were asked to complete three tasks:

1. Explore available campaigns.
2. Join a campaign from Facebook page.
3. Start a new campaign.

As a result, our participants completed all user flows with no errors.

❗️❗️❗️ However, the test has also revealed some issues:

• Lack of information and guidance in the process of starting a new campaign.
• ~Participants complained about a lack of information at all stages, creating hesitance to complete tasks.
• ~Testers felt the app was more suited for expert activists, not the general public.
• ~“Guidance” was a frequently expressed need.
• Participants were overwhelmed by the campaign creation process.
• Participants expressed a strong desire for more evident proof of impact and next steps.

😀 😀 😀  On the other hand we also received positive feedback. Participants appreciated and approved of:

• The possibility to search and explore other campaigns before creating their own.
• Introduced social aspects, such as the share on social media button and follow others.
• The guest log-in when joining a campaign first seen on social media.

Based on the test our recommendations for the next design iteration are:

👉  Create a more explicit onboarding process illustrating the campaign creation process.

• Create an onboarding page taking users through the campaign creation process.
• Outline steps in the campaign process and include a progress indicator.
• Establish trust with the SlaveFreeTrade brand by including more info and links. Make the messaging clearer by using the brand's language.

👉  Make a template the default for starting a campaign.

"Okay, so I can start from a template, which is good, because I'm a slow writer. And then a lot of people and most people in internet are bad writers. So the templates, probably a good feature to have".

– (Participant #1)

👉  Inform users about the progress when a campaign is created and provide the next steps.

• Participants expressed the desire to know what happens after the campaign is created.
• Participants wanted to know how they track the development of the campaign.

RESEARCH LIMITATIONS

• The small number of testers was linked to our limited ability to recruit participants for the test. One of the reasons for this was the specific time of the year – around the winter holidays – where people are more likely to be less available.
• We identified several issues in the pilot run but had no resources to fix the design issues in time before going into the sessions with participants.

Project Outcomes

This project was a collaboration between two organizations: Tech Fleet and SlaveFreeTrade. As a UX services provider, Tech Fleet has helped the NGO SlaveFreeTrade shape its envisioned product's future. And I am proud and happy to have been part of the Tech Fleet's team. Noticeable outcomes of this collaborations are:

• Tech Fleet helped the client understand the needs of their primary audience – ethical consumers –  and form strategies around a business model.
• The client started fundraising to build the app; they hit their fundraising goals in May 2021. 🙌
• The client is currently in the middle of building the MVP with an internal team based on our research and design.

This is what Sumati Mattu, the Chief Marketing Officer at SlaveFreeTrade, had to say:

“​​Techfleet took our brief as the starting point for the idea and build on it with extensive desk research, consumer polls and surveys to come up with screen designs that were based on that deeper consumer understanding. Their team was a delight to work with, we learned from their rigour and their openness made the sharing of ideas at every stage of the development possible. The regular check-ins made them feel like an extension of our organisation and we really appreciate the sense of ownership they treated our project with.”