Beekind. A conservation tool for the busy bee.
Introduction.
Since 2013, it has been widely reported that bee populations have fallen by up to a third or more. Bee populations play an integral role within our eco-system, contributing up to 65 percent of all our food crops and in Australia, 35 industries are dependent on honeybee pollination. It has been theorised that if bees were to disappear, humans would have just four years of survival left.
Our goals.
My goal for this project was to make conservation more accessible to people who may be well-intentioned but otherwise disengaged in current conservation efforts. This would, in the long-term, help strengthen bee populations.
Original problem statement.
With this goal in mind, the original problem statement was structured around younger eco-conscious city dwellers who both needed a way to source local honey and grow their gardens while wanting to contribute to environmental conservation. With bee populations declining, these city dwellers rely on increasingly dwindling bee populations for their gardens.
Measures of success.
With our problem statement in mind, we determined our measures of success to be the following:
Short-term measure of success: successful onboarding of 10 customers within the Darebin or surrounding areas with a 6-month minimum usage of the product.
Long-term measure of success: seeing direct uplift of bee populations and hives in the local Darebin area that we can directly attribute to the product. Measured by customer numbers, feedback and usage.
Long-term measure of success: enhanced awareness in the local community, measured by interviews and studies among members of the local community over a 12–24-month period.
My role.
My role within this project was to conduct, analyse and implement user and market analysis, and subsequently lead the visual design/UI development towards the completion of the project. Timing and constraints on this project were tight, so this project was an exploratory dive into territory which would benefit from a larger budget and expanded timeframes.
Research.
Competitive and Comparative Analysis.
We conducted a competitive and comparative analysis to discover direct and indirect competitors and to explore if there was a good market fit to develop a product that aligned to our problem statement. We found that while there were products that provided a partial solution to our problem statement, there was not yet an existing
or accessible platform which users could easily engage with.
Figure 1a. An example of our competitive analysis from local and national, direct and indirect, competitors.
Figure 1b. An example of our comparative analysis from direct and indirect competitors.
Examples include applications for Woolworths, Headspace, Uber and Google Maps.
User interviews.
To continue our exploratory analysis, we conducted a series of user interviews
with 5 participants to gain an understanding of potential user needs and wants.
It’s from here that we synthesised key findings through affinity mapping.
The mapping divulged patterns which revealed that users had a desire to help the conservation of the environment and community, but it was time and lack thereof that was causing inaction. Users wanted to help but it had to fit into their schedule. This research was particularly pivotal in our product development.
If the product couldn’t adapt seamlessly into a user’s schedule, how could we expect to engage disengaged users? We knew that for this product to be viable, it had to be mobile and non-invasive within a user’s current lifestyle.
Figure 2. An example of some key quotes from our customer interviews.
Pivot!
Influenced by the results from our user testing, we needed to redefine our problem statement. Users weren’t focused on getting a physical end product (honey) as we originally assumed, but were focused primarily on the lack of time they had to help conservation efforts.
Redefined problem statement.
Frances needs a way to preserve bee
populations conveniently because she is concerned about their conservation but
hasn’t the time to help contribute.
Developing a persona.
The results of our user interviews and redefined problem statement allowed us to shape a primary persona to empathise with the user, which would help influence our basic user flow “happy path”.
Figure 3. Our persona for Frances, developed based from the data synthesised from our user interviews and redefined problem statement.
Once we had determined our happy path and mapped out our user flow, we then focused on the development of what our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) should be and any features that would be necessary to include via a feature prioritisation matrix. This matrix would also help influence our site map moving forward. With data gathered from the matrix, we were able to fine-tune our MVP. It clearly showed that the primary feature we had to include needed to address “How do I get bees?” Pretty simple right?
“How do I get bees?”
Wireframes & user testing.
Now with our key design decisions backed by research, we moved into developing our key screen wireframes. Initially, we used wireframe sketches to map page heuristics, decisions and flow to generate feedback rapidly. The main concern unearthed in this phase was that our general navigation was unclear. Re-evaluating our sitemap, we found we had not properly synthesised the original data from our card sort. We conducted a new card sorting exercise and here the design was amended so that a menu or prompt was included on each page. The menu and account functions were also consolidated to alleviate further confusion. These changes allowed the user to feel unconstrained and to navigate the product confidently.
Figure 4. An example of our amended key screen wireframe with the addition of the menu button. Also drawing, not my strong point.
Figure 5. An expansion on the payment screen, showing potential flow of our features. Not essential to our MVP however.
Outcomes.
We developed our basic working prototype for our MVP based off our previous research which was further iterated on what was tested successfully with customers.
The most interesting learnings came from the pivots we found in our user interviews and how that redefined our original problem statement based off our original assumptions. (You know what they say about assuming.)
Our next steps, given the opportunity of an expanded budget, would be to further extend our user research and testing to more users, including apiarists and any legal or council entities who would need to be involved.
To be a product we could take to market confidently, further research and testing would need to be conducted before progressing. Moving forward, we would spend further time on synthesising our data, user questions and dialogue and making sure we expand this across the rest of our research.
Following further research, we would also like to explore how we can improve our micro-interactions within the product to better engage customers and in turn help our little friends in black and yellow.
To view our prototype WIP in action, click here. (Best viewed on desktop)