As consciousness about health and ecology started to arise in this century, many people shifted to plant-based diets. Because of the creation of new customer needs, food business with “cruelty-free”, healthy and ecologic values became more common. Nowadays, there is a great number of them all over the world. The characteristics of these types of businesses depend greatly on the culture and country in which they are inserted. In South America, they are usually small to medium size, they are trusted by their customer community, and they are run by their owners and some employees. Management and organizational tools used are majorly outdated and inefficient. The challenge was the following: provide an application to solve businesses' main pain-points and make business running a delightful experience.

A deep research plan was created and executed in order to get to know users' pain points, behaviors, motivations, needs and wants.

Step 1: Semi-structured interviews with three business owners. Key insights from these interviews were extremely valuable to the process:

Whatsapp is the business's main communication channel and it has plenty of pitfalls. It derives in long conversations with clients and makes the business lose lots of time and energy. As well as this, orders have to be rewritten down elsewhere making the system prone to mistakes.

Businesses have trouble managing their ingredient and production stock. Since they don’t have an efficient system to control this information.

Keeping track of revenue is also hard for many businesses because a big number of units are sold (unlike other types of businesses where fewer units with more expensive prices are sold). Also, because of organizational flaws associated with production stock.

Step 2: Surveys were conducted in order to check if key findings from the previous research stage were representative of most users' reality. Thirty vegan and vegetarian food business owners were surveyed.

Collected data showed the following:

To conclude, surveys proved most of our insights were, to some extent, valid and representative.

After analyzing research notes I came up with ten features for the App, and used a Complexity-Value matrix to prioritize them:

If I truly wanted to make a difference in business owners' lives, more than a group of features had to be considered. That is why I came up with recommendations to enhance the experience:

Allow a neat and one-way communication channel

Simple math will be used to calculate how productive the remaining ingredient stock is.

Push Notifications will be sent when an ingredient is running out.

All extra production in stock will be easily and quickly uploaded by the user.

Easy access to their revenue (either current or past ones). Visualization should be ordered and clear.

After a lot of iteration on paper, a Lo-Fidelity Prototype was built to start to consider and test key aspects of our product usability:

Data collected along five tests are described in the following user task flow. Red notes indicate errors and things to improve. Green notes indicate the positive aspects of the design.

I took what I learned in the first round of usability tests and developed a High-fidelity prototype:

A second Usability Test was made in this stage and with user feedback, more improvements were achieved:

Accessibility: the color palette was changed so all screens passed WCAG tests.

Improving KPIs: Very simple changes impacted a lot on the time users took to perform a task. In this case, wording changes were the key. Instead of a conjugated verb as “delivered” which may look like a status, I used “deliver” in the main CTA buttons of Orders screen. Also, surrounding the word with a button box made it evidently tappable. Test results showed the time on task was improved by 80%.

The challenge was to design an innovative management tool for a very specific type of food business which is the veg (vegan or vegetarian) sector. To do this a complete design process took place, with deep initial research and two instances of usability testing, which provided key insights and redirected many design ideas I had.

Research showed most small and medium-size businesses agree on having several flaws regarding organization and management, and these issues can be solved by a digital product.

Important decisions made included features prioritization because if I want this product to be developed, it will have to be versioned since product complexity can be high.