UX&UI / 2021

Food Service Offering (FSO) Concept Design

Responsibilities: Concept Design, UI Design & UX Evaluation

The Challenge

Stora Enso’s Food Service Offering (FSO) is getting bigger and bigger as the market for food on the go is rising. In preparation for the “Stora Enso cross-divisional offering for Food Services,” there was a need to understand the offering and end-uses. Considering the customer demands, FSO aimed to simplify the communication within Packaging Material Division and be able to provide a strong, straightforward offering to customers. However, getting started was easy as I was confronted with scattered customer insights (background documents) that were necessary for me to understand the context and a tight deadline. Baking research into the design process was a daunting challenge as the customer requested a complete solution within four weeks. The customer expected to see some early product concepts a few days later after the kickoff.

My Role

As a lead UX Designer, I started with hypothesis design to efficiently find out what should be built and why by making and evaluating assumptions, and clearly communicating the vision, priorities, and overall solution concept. After that, I designed the user experience using the feature, which provided input to estimate the ROI of solution options (business value vs. effort to build the solution) and gave developers an early understanding of the desired user flow and design to help plan the development. During design collaboration, the user interface design was further fleshed out for all scenarios by me. Collaborating with a researcher, we reviewed and inspected the UIs with the end users to ensure the design meet the quality requirements. I finalized the design visually in close collaboration with internal designers. The validation happened across the whole process. I collected feedback through light sessions, like Q&A through quick calls, simple chats, commenting tools, or very serious feedback sessions like user testing.

Therefore, I adopted a hypothesis-driven design approach where I designed solutions and test them with stakeholders/users, and advanced my understanding and business solution through design…

How to create value for the customer through hypothesis-driven design?

I started the hypothesis design by articulating why we’re doing things. I talked through why I was making those decisions to the client and then had that shared understanding reviewed and validated by the client. After that, I defined the metric of success. They can tell me if my hypothesis is good enough. The prototype we build is a collection of hypotheses. Some proven, some not. When we test our prototype with users, we see if our expectations are true or not. Once we got the feedback, we could further iterate the design to build the optimal design solution.

1. Hypothesis Design: Explore & Define

Make and evaluate the hypotheses for the following design questions ...

“We believe that [creating this] for [users] will achieve [this outcome].”

– Where does the FSO solution sit in the overall process?

– Who is the FSO solution designed for?

– What is the desired outcome expected from the users?

– At what point do users realize that the current solution isn’t working anymore?

– What is the learning process for delivering a successful sale?

– How are users expecting life to be better once they have the right solutions?

The overall goal is to provide a Simple & Fit-for-Purpose Single-Platform FSO Solution that match-makes customer criteria to the offered products at Stora Enso.

Criteria for success that tell if my hypothesis is good enough (leading indicator)

“We’ll know that this is true/false when we see this [key performance indicator change].”

Potential measures of success:

Calendar time and total effort to find a food packaging offer: from days/hours to hours/minutes and less communication across multiple channels

Source of improvement:

Fitness for purpose, designing for simplicity, efficient UIs for finding and comparing the product information, and configuration work

2. UX Discovery: Ideation & Evaluation

How to find a product offer: bottom-up approach & top-down approach

Optimize the user experience for different user groups

Early concepts

Once I thought through what we should build, I started working on the nitty-gritty of design. To have easy access to the FSO, we decided to build it on the web platform. When users land on the homepage, they should know why and what to do here above the fold. So we provided a call-to-action (“Find Offer”), which functioned as quick access to ready-made solutions for experienced users.

Users were able to read the product or compare multiple products on the product page. They could also go to the product structure to see the overview of the product decomposition and relationships. For different end-uses, there were different materials available, which might need different coatings. On the compare product page, users could see the difference between selected products in terms of different product properties. As for the bottom-up approach, we came up with two proposals. Option A was a wizard-like configurator, which guided users step by step giving requirement values to search for the fitting product. Option B was a product catalog with advanced filtering where users could define the requirements and narrow down the fitting options.

UX evaluation

An initial hi-fi prototype was built based on the defined product concepts, which were used in the following usability testing. There were two evaluation sessions: Figma prototype commenting (unmoderated usability testing) and design walkthrough (moderated usability testing). To avoid bias, a UX researcher led the moderated usability testing by walking through the prototype to the user and asking follow-up questions.

#Goals

To understand the following areas from the user’s perspective:

What is unclear in the prototype?

What is clear and works in the prototype?

If there is something important missing from the concept?

#Participants

Two sales directors and one sales manager from Stora Enso

#Processes

Two participants (sales directors from SE) reviewed the prototype themselves through Figma and put all the positive and negative comments there. The design walkthrough session was conducted online through Microsoft Teams meetings and planned for an hour. The researcher explained the purpose of this session and demonstrated the design based on user scenarios. Afterward, she interviewed the participant to explore the three defined research questions.

3. Design Collaboration: Iterative Design

UI Design

During the visual design phase, I created visual design including colors, shapes, signs, symbols, tables, typography, etc, by using components from SEEDS Digital UI Library (i.e. StoraEnso’s Design System), which built a common visual language through StoraEnso’s digital products ensuring a seamless experience. I had internal design reviews with other UX/visual designers to inspect the UIs and guarantee the quality of the visual design.

Final Design

Impact

The validated and high-customer-satisfying FSO solution improves Stora Enso’s productivity in the pre-sales stage where customer criteria can be efficiently matched to the offerings at SE. Customers search and compare desired product information in an easy and intuitive way and shorten the time of communication where they find a fitting solution matching their business demands without delay.

#Reflection

This project received high customer satisfaction. The hypothesis-driven design approach helped a lot when proper research activities could not be arranged. It enabled us to make a design decision that makes a real impact and improves user experience. I was happy with the collaboration and communication with the client. They gave prompt and effective feedback. Also, the internal design collaboration like ideation/concept review workshops efficiently pushed design forward and guaranteed the quality of the design solution.

However, there was still something to be improved. It would be great if we could provide better new team members onboarding on the project background and context and have a centralized insight repository. I strongly believe if we could make provisions before the project kick-off meeting in order to take a lead in terms of design instead of just listening to what the client wants, we can then push the boundaries of design solutions, define areas of interest, and plan resource for design better in the very first beginning, as sometimes the clients are not sure what they want or not sure they are asking the right thing.

User testing in this project was done by a dedicated researcher exploring the quality of the solution through three aspects: what is clear, what is unclear, and if there is something important missing. It was good to have this feedback, but this feedback wasn’t enough, or couldn’t 100% tell the success of the solution. As I have previously defined the success metrics, like the calendar time and total effort for the users to find a food packaging offer, the quality of the design solution through Fitness for purpose: a) can the optimal product offer be reached in principle; b) how easily can the product offer be reached; c) how strongly can the GUI please users and improve the brand experience. Those were not intentionally measured. The measurement work could be done better if considering more about the context. So I would suggest in the future the UX designers should also participate in the usability test planning together with researchers to bridge the user testing strategy and the UX metrics if there are dedicated researchers assigned. Last but not least, it would be better to have more metrics, like user satisfaction rating, ease-of-use rating, task success rate, time on task, error rate, and productivity) as testing results instead of just subjective feedback, which could also better present the impact of the project, doesn’t it.