Just Right Info Bites
Educational games about insect-based pet food
Contents
Summary
Stakeholder selection
Research
Literature review
Interview study
Competitive analysis
Ideation
Co-design workshops
Concept selection
Prototype development
Concept validation
First full prototype
Usability test
Final prototype
Next steps
Additional research
Completing the games
Stakeholder selection
Our original project brief suggested that the company we would partner with, Just Right Bite, would become our primary stakeholder. However, we quickly found that their expressed needs weren't a good fit for our abilities or interests:
Attract more customers and grow their business: We specialized in human-centered design, not marketing/sales.
Measure the carbon footprint of their operations: Perhaps we could have prototyped a complex measurement tool, but it would have taken us away from our interest in pets and their needs.
Establish a circular economy in their operations: We didn't have the materials or package design expertise to help make their packaging recyclable or compostable.
Applying a circular economy lens to the field of possible stakeholders helped clarify our planning. Based on our shared interest in animals and nature, we settled on dog owners, their dogs, and the Earth itself as primary stakeholders. Secondary stakeholders included JRB, pet food sellers, and insect farmers.
Research
Literature review
To prepare ourselves to fully understand our stakeholders' needs, we had to "bone up" on five different topics.
Clipart by Pixabay user u_7egpmxvswe (modified)
Key findings:
The problem: Factory farming of livestock commonly used in dog food has massive land, water, and climate impacts.
The solution: Insect-based dog food is much less resource-intensive, more protein-dense, and hypoallergenic.
Key barriers: Adoption in Western countries has been slowed by lack of knowledge and an “ick factor” around eating insects.
Circular economy: Circular food packaging is reusable, either recyclable or compostable, and often designed to lengthen the food’s shelf life.
Persuasive design: Designers have used cute anthropomorphic cartoon insects to make insect-based food for humans more attractive, but only if it looks like familiar food.
Interviews with dog owners
To find an appropriately human-, dog-, and planet-centered problem to solve, we decided on an open-ended interview study to learn how dog owners might relate to insect-based pet food. I led the recruiting effort, using a variety of online networks as well as flyering in pet stores, and helped run most of the interview sessions.
Key findings:
Dog health and preferences were the most important factors in the foods and treats dog owners chose to buy.
Personally known experts had much greater influence on dog owners than e.g. vets mentioned on food packaging.
Humanization of their “fur babies” led dog owners to project their own food preferences onto their dogs, e.g. variety.
The “ick factor” around insect-based food appeared much more common among younger dog owners than JRB thought.
Ecological concerns were secondary or an afterthought in even highly eco-conscious dog owners’ decisionmaking around their dogs.
Competitive analysis
We studied the strengths and weaknesses of 3 U.S. and 3 foreign makers of insect-based dog food. We also performed a SWOT analysis on JRB itself.
Key strengths of JRB's American competitors:
Mature and varied product line, certified quality ingredients.
All of the above plus a monthly auto refill option.
All of the above plus eco-friendly packaging and online eco-education.
Ideation
Co-design workshops
Working with dog owners to co-design possible solutions would have been ideal, but we were strapped for time and chose the simpler method of planning two workshops with JRB's four employees instead. This proved highly beneficial to both their team and ours.
Empathy workshop
- First we shared an hour worth of clips from our interviews to help JRB build more connection with their potential customers' needs.
- Having taken notes on Post-its, we used them to map the interviewees' thoughts and feelings on a large empathy board.
- Next, we took down the Post-its and did an affinity mapping exercise to regroup them into themes.
- Finally, we used dot voting to choose the most important problems and opportunities to be addressed.
Ultimately we aligned on a single theme: dog owner perceptions of insect-based food, including the ick factor and concerns about nutrition. This implied that our design solution would need to be an educational tool of some kind.
Ideation workshop
- We started the second session with journey mapping to find touch points where educational interventions could be added.
- With this context, we all did a Crazy 8s sketching exercise to quickly brainstorm design concepts.
- Then we mapped our ideas on an Impact-Effort chart to help choose a concept that would be both powerful and feasible to prototype.
Concept selection
We followed a fairly ad-hoc process for narrowing down the ideas from the ideation workshop to one that we would prototype:
- From the 30 ideas on the Impact-Effort chart, each team member took two ideas to expand on through sketches and journey maps.
- We presented our work to each other in a concept workshop and did a round of dot voting.
- We combined our two favorite ideas, collectible cards and a set of online educational games (the latter was one of the ideas I journey-mapped).
- A teammate proposed an additional component, free or discounted JRB products as rewards for completing the games, and we voted to approve it.
Prototype development
Concept validation
We did some quick concept validation research to see whether our cards and games design was worth pursuing, simulating an experience of finding a card at the Just Right Bite farmer's market booth and scanning a QR code to play one of several "phone" games. This included:
- Remote sessions with prior interviewees and static mockup images
- In-person sessions with fellow students and paper prototypes
Key findings:
Collectible cards: Most participants would use them and share them with friends/family, although a couple of people found them childish.
Educational games: The crossword was especially popular. The most common feedback was to simplify the games as much as possible.
Incentives: Participants said they would be attracted by large discounts or buy-one-get-one-free deals on Just Right Bite products.
First full prototype
I wasn't heavily involved in the prototyping work, but I helped develop the overall concepts for how things would work.
Collectible cards
To balance printing costs with JRB's need to manage promotional campaigns, we came up with the following plan for the physical cards:- Five fixed card designs created by my teammate Hayley Pike, with quick facts about insect-based dog food and QR codes to access the five linked educational games.
- Small stickers with unique bar codes granting users access to certain rewards for completing the games.
Games and incentives
The Figma prototype, developed almost entirely by my teammate Angel Wylie, involved the following steps:- Scanning the QR code on a physical card or clicking a link on a digital one.
- For physical cards, entering the unique code to fully "collect" the card (ideally we would have had a bar-code scanner built into the landing page to simplify this).
- Playing one of five simple games: crossword, word scramble, cryptogram, true-false quiz, or circular economy drag-and-drop puzzle.
- Clicking a link to a JRB store page to redeem a reward, or saving a promo code for later.
Usability study
We only had time and recruiting capacity to do three usability study sessions, repeating the farmer's market scenario with our mobile game prototype running on a tablet. Participants gave mostly positive feedback but suggested several areas for improvement, such as:
- Simplifying the user flow.
- Adding more visual interest, e.g. animations.
- Making it possible to complete all five games in one sitting.
- Including personalized gifts rather than just providing discounts on JRB products.
Final prototype
With a bit of assistance from me, Angel created a much-improved Figma prototype in response to feedback from our test users. Hayley mocked up a new incentive for completing all five games, a treat jar with a personalized label. I assembled a document for JRB describing and linking to our prototype, and created a video prototype dramatizing the full user flow.
Prototype updates
- Removed bar codes from the cards to simplify entry into the games.
- Allowed the player to "collect" all cards within the game experience after "fetching" one to start with.
- Added several animations to reward the user for correct answers and completing games.
- Revised the incentive model and visualized it using a sideways thermometer graphic.
- Included a mockup of a JRB online store page with the personalized treat jar (I created this).
Next steps
Additional research
At the end of the project, we made plans for how we would continue if given the opportunity, focusing on research to remedy some limitations of our work. We would have:
- Run an online validation survey to check the findings from the initial interview study with a much larger, more diverse participant group.
- Performed additional usability tests including features we didn't have time to test, such as entry points from social media.
- Put out a follow-up quiz weeks to months after people go through the games to test long-term retention of the information.
Completing the games
Assuming the research didn't send us back to the drawing board, we would still have had plenty of work to do turning our prototyped online games into a fully usable experience.
- We received feedback on text being too small to read easily, but didn't have time to redesign our page layouts to accommodate larger text.
- We never implemented multiple entry points, e.g. from social media, or having different QR codes so the game could correctly identify which card the user had "fetched."
- Figma's ability to support text entry and processing was too limited to enable fully playable word games (and text entry on Figma's phone app was flatly impossible), so our prototype would need to be re-implemented on another platform to be fully playable.
Unfortunately, Just Right Bite is now out of business and none of these plans will ever come to fruition. But I can safely say that this end-to-end human-centered design project was a big help in preparing us all for a variety of work in UX research and design.
This portfolio is released under a Creative Commons BY SA license.