Food Trust

Since joining the Food Trust team in November 2017, I have worked with many different folks in the organization. I sit with our business development, marketing, and offering management teams, with whom I align our business research agenda to design research in order to best leverage our resources.

Team alignment through research

I have kept teams aligned through design thinking activities with clients and internal stakeholders, research agenda planning, sharing tips on research methods with my teammates, and participating in meetings with advisory board members.

My first major task with the Food Trust team was to help align the many stakeholders across four Food Safety groups on three hills each. I organized several sessions via Mural with each team individually to educate them on what a hill is, why it’s valuable, and using it as a medium to share knowledge. In the end about 15 co-creating stakeholders converged on three hills per team, approved by the offering management leader, and presented to or viewed by many more across our teams.

Secondary research

Most of my focus is on developing our research agenda for both business and design issues. Another one of my first major tasks was to review our personas. I found that what had been defined already was very loose and not as clearly grounded in documented evidence as I felt we should be confident in. I started by gathering materials mentioning any role, job, user, or persona from across our team. I validated what I gathered with some internal stakeholders that this was the generally agreed upon personas.

Then, I went to job posting sites using the same keywords and titles as I had gathered internally. I found some important differences in both what terminology we used as well as how our assumptions matched up with real expectations from the folks we expected would use Food Trust. I compiled these into both a brief and lengthy version of what I referred to as target groups, as the data referred to something more like a market segment or real groups/characteristics of people. I presented this work and validated it with my stakeholders who had spoken with these potential users before, and they found I had reached a higher fidelity for our shared understanding of who we design for.

This also provided a foundation for two research thrusts into how producers may find value in Food Trust, as they are unlike our large multinational clients, as well as what their technological readiness is to use the service. I am now compiling research into how consumers may benefit from Food Trust data, as well as how we might provide that information that is usable at the right time and place. All of these were compiled as Powerpoint decks and are IBM confidential.

Primary research

My foundational target group research has also helped me tailor primary research. In early 2018 I visited a local farmer’s market to gather more data on how the producers there ran their business as much as how they work on their farm (or other operation). I compiled my research and presented to offering management to demonstrate what they valued as a point of divergence from our priorities at the time regarding producers and how they interact directly with consumers. I received a lot of praise from this, and a major marketing video was produced with our VP at the same farmers market following that presentation.

Working with my business development colleagues, I have helped them develop surveys to send to producers, manufacturers, and distributors, as well as incorporating more design-oriented questions to guide my team’s work. I am now adapting the surveys as both an unmoderated questionnaire to be send by email as well as a guide to be delivered as an interview in conjunction with a contextual inquiry. My interviews with other industry experts and producers has helped guide this upcoming research.

Evaluations

Another major responsibility is leading usability and heuristic evaluations of our UIs. Through a number of methods, including heuristic and cognitive walkthroughs and usability tests, I have ensured our interfaces are usable, accessible, and consistent with our overall design language.

I work with our client success team to record and observe our current beta users as they use our product normally, which also allowed me to construct an evidence-based as-is journey map for each of our modules. Using this journey map and input from our architect and offering managers, I have been able to also construct a to-be journey map and set of needs statements that help us articulate what a future state of Food Trust might be. In this vein, I work with my manager and UX design lead to build lo/mid-fi conceptual prototypes of certain components in order to best collaborate on this future state.