Love Local

Business partnership service to help local businesses survive and profit while protecting their independency.

1.0. Overview

I was UX Writer and Researcher in a Masters in User Experience Design project to create an innovative business solution and prototype.

In addition to collaborating with the other team members at all project phases, my individual contributions to the project were:

-User interviews
-UX strategy and content

2.0. The challenge

Our goal was to create an conceptual innovative digital product or service that would solve a problem and offer exceptional value, benefitting a target user group, using UX-driven product strategy and design thinking.

Our research showed that although local business is an important segment of the country’s economy, since 2015, 22 stores have disappeared on average every day in Spain. Further, this sector has been extremely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic therefore our challenge was to promote local businesses.

3.0. The solution

We explored innovation methods and ideation techniques and created a business proposal and high-fidelity prototype website for Love Local.

Our mission is to become the go-to business partner of independent store owners to help them survive the pandemic. Together we will fight back by ensuring they profit while protecting their independence.

High-fidelity prototype

High-fidelity wireframes

4.0. Discover

We first set up our teams so that there was a mix of leadership styles within the group and then we had a team building session to find out what skills we bring and what experiences we can share. We then conducted exploratory desk research on current business world challenges and had a brainstorming session to find a key theme to base our project on. The topic that most of the team anonymously voted for was one of my proposals: Promotion of local businesses.

We used the P.O.E.M.S framework to consider opportunities connected to improving local businesses as we observe customers entering and exiting, and purchasing in local stores in Barcelona.

Infographic: Consumer shopping preferences during COVID-19 pandemic

We also conducted qualitative research and interviewed 7 independent store owners in Barcelona, 4 of whom were interviewed by myself.

We listened to other key members of the local community ecosystem. Myself and the other UX researcher interviewed 2 representatives from Barcelona Council’s local economic development agency, Barcelona Activa.

What the key members of the local community ecosystem are saying:

4.1. Define

By organizing our collected user research insights into categories and analyzing them, we defined our approach through a “How Might We” question which addresses the problems that we uncovered.

How could Barcelona council’s digital platform increase the impact of its initiatives to help local businesses survive the current pandemic crisis?

User personas

After sorting through all of our collected data, we conducted empathy mapping to help us better understand our target users - independent store owners - and reveal deeper insights. We then created user personas to focus on what independent store owners want from our solution.

4.2. Develop

In this phase, we ideated and developed our solution.

Customer journey mapping

We carried out customer journey mapping exercises with an independent store owner to understand their goals and actions when trying to look for information from the Barcelona council to help them during the pandemic.

Ideation

We carried out ideation using methods such as brainstorming and Crazy 8s, and then each team member presented a solution sketch.

The team voted for my solution sketch (No. 2) to be combined with No. 4 for development of the final solution.

Final solution

Based on the final voted concepts we developed the Love Local loyalty program.

Business proposal

As part of the project brief, we were also tasked to create a business proposal. For this purpose, we created the following:

-Business model flowcharts
-Product roadmap
-Business model canvas
-Cash flow
-Campaign website and video

Benchmarking

We conducted benchmarking to see how our service would compare with other existing similar services.

5.0. Next steps

This was a 2-month conceptual project which allowed me to showcase my other strengths of UX writing and strategy to guide the rest of the team. I believe that we were able to create a great solution in that time, addressing the challenge of helping independent store owners survive and thrive during the pandemic. If time had allowed, it would have been fantastic to be able to continue to the Delivery stage and conduct user testing, with the goal of collaboration with the Barcelona City Council.