UX Case Study: Online Communities for Flexitarians during Covid-19
Role: Individual Researcher
Timeline: Approximately 3 to 4 weeks
Target Audience: Millennials & GenZ Flexitarians (Thailand-Based)
Deliverables: Empathy Map, User Persona, Brainstorming Map, Crazy 8s, and User Journey Map
Overview:
The popularity of the flexitarian & plant-based diet trend is rising globally among younger generations.
As a Millennials myself, I was initially interested in exploring the ongoing trends toward the creation of a platform for Thailand-based Millennials & GenZ flexitarians
The analysis of the key insights from the user research has brought me a new perspective to propose a practical solution that helps them start or maintain their healthy eating lifestyle during the global pandemic of the Covid-19.
Problem Statement:
Despite the global pandemic of Covid-19, the flexitarian users used to practice a healthy diet regularly but have been struggling to do so. They are still looking to maintain their eating habits to achieve their personal goals in life for the good of their health benefits as well as ethical reasons.
Community Engagement is a crucial aspect among the Millennials & GenZ flexitarians. The actual challenge for them to maintain their healthy eating habits is about the lack of community engagement. This has hiddenly affected their motivation to effectively push themselves to maintain healthy eating habits under the circumstances.
Solution:
The accessible online community founded on the Facebook platform is a community where health & fitness enthusiasts meet for a good cause to contribute their passion, expertise, and encouragement for others to live and grow during a hard time of Covid-19.
The Design Approach
Empathize Phase
I conducted both primary and secondary research for this case study. There are two points of the secondary research; a brief Covid-19 situation in Thailand and global flexitarian trends.
- Secondary Research (Covid-19 in Thailand)
Since March 2020, Thailand has faced Covid-19 restrictions, e.g., lockdown and curfew. The restrictions caused a critical impact on people (WFH, etc.) and businesses around the country such as malls, restaurants, and physical gyms/fitness centers — in this case, physical gyms or fitness centers were ordered to stop operating for more than 300 days. - Secondary Research (Global Flexitarian Trends)
The younger generations, Gen Z & Millennials, are essentially becoming more aware of health and environmental concerns through the widespread mainstream of plant-based foods and the flexitarian.
- Primary Research
The ideal target users were Gen Z & Millennials who practice a healthy diet and are interested in plant-based. The remote user interview was the primary qualitative research method to gain in-depth insights out of them.
Planning User Research Session
The main objectives are to figure out insights by collecting points of view and key findings to set the direction of the case study, defining the scope of needs, and ideating initial design ideas as follows.
- Objective A: Concept & Goals
To learn about the concept and process of users’ daily routine & eating habits from before & during Covid-19, personal interests or knowledge-based in plant-based, and their short & long term goals. - Objective B: Problems & Concerns
To explore any problems, concerns, barriers that users encounter when trying to maintain their healthy eating habits, especially during Covid-19.
During the interview sessions, I used notecards to write down key memos. This was very good to quickly review the timeline and key messages of my users during & after the session.
After the interview sessions, it was time to organize my collecting data from both participants. I digested the findings by transcribing the interview session from a recording application and note cards on A4 papers and a notebook.
Empathy Map
Empathy maps played a big role at the early stage of the user-centered design process in uncovering key research findings and externalizing knowledge about users to prioritize the pain points & needs.
Below are the empathy maps of each of the user research participants.
Define Phase
Based on the empathy maps, both users have shared several common aspects including the pain points, goals, and interests. The key findings analysis enables me to see a range of useful insights listed below.
The Insights
Major Insights:
- All users have a good understanding of nutrition. They used to practice healthy eating habits regularly but have stopped since the pandemic has begun.
- An influence from people in their connections (family, friends, colleagues, partner, or even strangers) is significant to consider for their health & fitness lifestyle. Social media is also quite influential to GenZ users.
- Community is very important. Unable to stay connected with friends and community affect their motivation and commitment to run other activities including maintaining healthy eating habits.
- Working out is an important factor that propels users to set a standard of good eating habits. Gyms were closed during the covid-19 pandemic causing them to start lacking the motivation to work out.
Minor Insights:
- Both users could be considered flexitarians since they used to and/or have been practicing a flexitarian diet.
- Plant-based food was also mentioned as part of their interest.
- Animal food products & environmental concerns were mentioned as part of their insights and/or goals to spread this current awareness.
Hypothesis:
Online community engagement is an essential key to keeping the users motivated to be able to maintain healthy diet habits.
User Persona
In these early stages of the design process, I’ve built a good empathy with my target users through key research findings and key insights as follows.
The next step is to create a fictional user persona that the pain points, goals, needs, interests, and background incorporate together to represent a specific target audience.
Ideate Phase
From key research findings to key insights, from key insights to user persona. And from user persona to creative ideas for solutions! There were four different methods conducted to bring out ideas in the right direction; how might we, brainstorming, crazy 8s, and user journey map as follows.
In preparation for the ideate phase, I started with the concept of “How Might We..?” or “HMWs” questions to help me narrow down the scope of ideation to give a guideline to the following ideating process about the possible solutions for the challenging problem areas.
However, since this is an individual case study, the “HMW” has changed to “HMI” aka “How Might I…” → Just wanted to think outside the box here :)
How Might I…?
1. How Might I get them motivated to work out when they lack motivation?
2. How Might I help them to start their healthy diet lifestyle again?
3. How Might I help them stay connected with friends and community?
4. How Might I find them some interesting communities to engage with?
5. How Might I help them to feel inspired through the period of covid-19?
Brainstorming
Let’s bring out new fresh ideas in this session!
Crazy 8s
My Crazy 8s was based on the combination of “How Might I..?” and Brainstorming workshops. Briefly, the drawing images on Crazy 8s were related to health, food, and fitness. A few ideas were mainly focused on, you may find stickers on these favorite ideas.
User Journey Map
According to the hypothesis from the insights and due to the ideas gathered during the research & ideation phases, Facebook was chosen as a primary online community platform on social media to serve the persona, Pimpa.
Mapping out Pimpa’s current experience on the journey map allows me to gain more empathy and be able to visualize her overall experience & engagement through each stage in the user journey map.
Prototype Phase
Initially, the UX research part (the first 3 phases) is actually the main focus of this case study. However, I find that to move forward with the prototype & test phase would also be a great idea to receive feedback or any further learnings from my research participants.
The ideas from the ideation phase have given me some useful information to seek for online communities on Facebook. Therefore, three Facebook groups and one Facebook page were selected as prototypes to support the hypothesis, with an expectation that one or more of them may serve as the proposed solution for the end-users.
Test Phase
Due to the timing and budget matter, I decided to conduct rapid testing with the same participants from the research interview as they were also considered the end-users of this case study.
User Testing Preparation
Objectives:
Define goals or expectations to create the flow of the interview process
- Explain to the participants about the user testing process and how I would like them to review the Facebook Groups & Page before sharing their feedback in the interview
- Collect findings for user testing analysis
Analyze key findings to support the hypothesis (each participant shows interest in engaging in at least one or more prototypes)
- Explore new insights or any recommendations for further development
Prototypes:
Prepare the existing prototypes, social media (Facebook Groups & Page)
Source: Clean Eating Recipes, Fitness, and Weightloss, Body Transformation Club, Workout Friends, Yoga With Adriene
Methodological Concepts:
Apply useful concepts of different testing methods as an idea for the user testing session
- Remote Testing; Phone / Facetime Interview via Google Meet or LINE
- Qualitative; Questionnaires
- Quantitative; Net Promoter Score
User Testing Questionnaire:
1. Demographics & Background
- Demographics; age, gender, occupation, relationship status
- Background; user’s background on social media usage
2. Testing Questions
- Feedback upon each specific online community
- Rank preference and engagement tendency among any of these communities
- On a scale of 1 to 5, how likely are they to recommend these online communities to someone?
User Testing Summary
To look for key findings analysis, I ran a quick test of the prototypes with the same participants from the earlier research phases to support the hypothesis as well as identify new insights for further areas of development.
Participant Data Summary:
A brief demographic & background summary of the participants on social media usage, the main focus is Facebook.
- The two participants are among Gen Z and Millennials (ages 20–35)
- Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are top social media used on mobile
- The average number of Facebook usage among the users is 6 days a week
- Purposes when using Facebook
→ Explore various contents including healthcare, technology, news & social events, products & restaurants review, travel, and life updates of personal connections
Key Findings Summary:
Users were encouraged to share their thoughts freely throughout the session. Each mentioned or showed interest in engaging in at least one or more online communities.
I simply put the summarized feedback in the map below.
Insights & Key Community Features:
Users were encouraged to share their thoughts freely throughout the session. Each mentioned or showed interest in engaging in at least one or more online communities.
- Active Engagement, Modern Presentation, Motivational Content, Supportive Community
- A variety of practical contents; diet, fitness, and home-cooking recipes
Conclusion:
As briefly explained in the hypothesis, online community engagement is essential to keep users motivated and maintain healthy diet habits.
Both of the communities “Clean Eating Recipes, Fitness, and Weightloss” and “Body Transformation” were significantly prioritized upon users’ preference to serve their needs and keep them motivated by engaging with online communities during the covid-19 pandemic more or less. There is also a good chance for them to recommend both of these groups to someone they know if the opportunity arises.
Furthermore, I find that the highlighted community features are quite useful to apply in further iteration knowledge and perhaps be able to seek many more suitable online communities for (extra) users in this case study.
Learnings & Challenges? And what might I do if I had more time with more resources available?
1. It was challenging while conducting the user research since there was no budget to recruit and compensate participants.
Ideally, I could have recruited up to 5 participants to ensure that I was targeting the represented group of users with a proper solution.
2. Not all of the recruited participants’ findings can be applied to the case study. In fact, three participants who shared the criteria were recruited for user research but found out after the analysis that only the first two could serve as the persona.
3. I struggled with the first remote user interview. It was my first time conducting actual user research in the UX case study. Reading body gestures was a challenge too. It took me quite some time to work through the process. However, I’ve learned and was a lot more prepared in the following interviews with better preparation of a good set of questions and other tools to take memos that saved me in this part!
4. Since new insights were figured from user testing, I could look up some more online communities as alternative prototypes before applying them in the test phase with (new recruited) participants — the follow-up process may also take from several weeks up to many weeks minimum (this also depends on the Covid-19 situation).
5. In the long period, creating actual online communities on different channels and linking them up together could be another alternative to serve users. There could be the same community on Facebook Page, Facebook Group, and YouTube channel.
Appendix
1. Initially, there were three participants, sharing the ideal recruiting criteria, involved in the research process. Somehow, some non-aligned points between the first two participants and the third one after conducting the user testing.
To simply explain, community engagement is a key factor for our users found in the research analysis. Therefore, I expected the online community to serve as the solution for all three users. However, the proposed solutions did not seem to serve the needs of #User 3 as well as the first two.
I went back to the research phase for the analysis again, only to understand that though User #3 may share similar interests along with the others. However, there’s no clear alignment of pain points shared with the other two and the case study at her current stage.
Nevertheless, the misunderstanding in User #3 findings does not prominently affect other deliverables shown in the case study, which have aligned well with the first two users already. Therefore, the case study was still able to conclude at the end.
2. At the beginning before running this case study, there was some confusion about the terms vegan, vegetarian, and plant-based. Reached out to a friend of mine who is known as a vegan for years. Her explanation & my desk research helped me frame the terms used to align with my case more clearly — plant-based and flexitarian.
Thank you so much for spending your time going through my first UX case study. Your feedback and valuable guidances are more than welcome! : )
