Boosting farmers market sales through a mobile app designed to empower shoppers

SANTA MONICA FARMERS MARKET

The Santa Monica Farmers Market (SMFM), a beloved Los Angeles institution, attracts everyone from culinary chefs to locals and tourists alike. However, the market’s wide range of vendors and produce can be both intimidating and overwhelming to unfamiliar shoppers.

PROBLEM

Designing an MVP mobile app that educates shoppers about seasonal produce and farm vendor attributes on-the-go, while also enhancing the in-person shopping experience

SOLUTION

End-to-end design, mobile app, user research, personas, wireframes, prototyping, usability testing

SKILLS

TIMEFRAME

3 weeks

OVERVIEW

What prevents people from shopping at the farmers market more often?

The Santa Monica Farmers Market, established in 1981, is one of the largest and most diverse farmers markets in the U.S. Attracting everyone from culinary chefs to locals and tourists, SMFM features over 60 California farms and takes place four days a week.

However, the market’s wide range of vendors and produce can also lead to overwhelmed shoppers. Particularly with SMFM’s prime shopper demographic getting older, their goal is to engage a new generation of shoppers, who are less familiar with home cooking and shopping seasonally. In the age of convenient food delivery apps, not everyone knows how to shop at the farmers market.

One farmers market vendor’s solution to educating customers about when different types of produce are in season.

RESEARCH AND USER INTERVIEWS

Examining three key perspectives

When approaching this project, it was important to consider the multiple perspectives at play: 1) the business, SMFM; 2) the farm vendors, which are also individual businesses; and 3) the shoppers.

After completing in-depth user interviews with the SMFM Market Manager, two vendors, and five shoppers who frequent the farmers market 1-2 times a month, I compiled the following key takeaways and painpoints:

SMFM

  • Frustrated by a limited existing website, which lacks detailed vendor information

  • Difficult to promote new items, vendors, or events

  • Difficult to educate shoppers about what’s in season

Vendors

  • Lack the time and resources required to improve marketing

  • No easy way to communicate with customers (many don’t have social media or even a website)

  • Unable to announce delays or changes to seasonal dates

  • Unable to promoting new produce

  • Unable to share ideas for how to eat or prepare produce

Shoppers

  • Suffer from decision fatigue, overwhelmed by the number of options

  • Unsure of what’s in season

  • Unable to differentiate between vendors, and therefore not sure who to buy from

  • Lack confidence in selecting produce

  • Need instructions or recipe ideas

GOALS AND CONSTRAINTS

Designing a feasible solution that requires limited vendor upkeep

Next, while the keeping the various perspectives in mind, I identified SMFM’s key business goals, which informed the rest of the design process. Following my in-depth conversations with SMFM and the vendors, I also had a clearer idea of the existing constraints—particularly when it came to the limited bandwidth for maintaining and updating app content.

GOALS

  • Increase sales revenue from market purchase

  • Increase in-person foot traffic

  • Improve vendor marketing

  • Provide education for shoppers

CONSTRAINTS

  • Three-week timeline to design MVP with select key flows

  • Limited funding from the city of Santa Monica

  • Limited resources for app upkeep:

    • Due to SMFM’s small team size, ideally the regular maintenance of the app would be comparable to the current upkeep of SMFM’s instagram account

    • Due to limited vendor resources, need to maximize benefits (potentially through a one-time onboarding) while limiting their day-to-day involvement

  • Accessibility for older existing shoppers, while still attracting a younger generation

IDEATION

Translating business goals and user needs into key mobile app functions

By creating an affinity map of all interviews, I was able to quickly identify two key topics: vendor marketing, and knowing what’s in season. Additionally, two secondary topics were discovering new vendors, and locating specific items at the market.

Based on these key topics, along with the established business goals, I determined the following primary functions of the mobile app:

KEY APP FUNCTIONS

  • Browse catalog of seasonal produce

  • Explore vendor pages with detailed information, attributes, and market map

  • Create a personalized Favorites list of items, vendors, etc

  • Receive notifications about items on Favorites list

SITEMAP

Prioritizing features of the bottom nav bar

When determining the app’s information architecture, I created sections to correlate with each primary app function. I also added a fifth tab for detailed information about the market itself, such as hours, parking and location (with 4 weekly markets in different locations, making detailed information easily accessible is key):

Home - Browse in-season produce, read latest news and announcements from the market
Vendors - Explore vendor pages
Favorites - Created personalized lists
Profile - Receive notifications
Info - Details about getting to SMFM, etc.

VISUAL IDENTITY

Minimal, image-driven designs that highlight fresh produce

Before creating the designs, I pulled competitor apps such as FreshDirect, Whole Foods, and Instacart for visual reference.

Key takeaways:

  • Tiled display - Although the MVP app does not have online shopping capabilities (yet), the tiled display helps with sensory appeal, catching the user’s eye and sparking interest. This also optimizes for displaying a higher number of items on one screen

  • Image backdrops - Against a white background, the items pictured feel commercial and sterile. I would explore using images of produce in a natural environment to promote an organic feel

  • Tags - FreshDirect’s use of “peak quality” tags is useful, but easy to miss

  • Bottom nav - The apps follow a similar architecture of a 1) home screen showing an overview of items, 2) a tab for viewing departments or aisles - similar to the vendor directory, 3) a cart - similar to Favorites in lieu of a cart, and 4) a profile/account section

I also create a mood board with more visual references, focused on utilizing striking images of fresh produce, providing inspiration for home cooks:

WIREFRAMES

User testing with wireframe prototypes

After iterating on initial sketches, I created wireframe prototypes and conducted moderated testing with 5 users. I received helpful feedback on vendor card information hierarchy and creating shortcuts for frequent tasks.

ITERATION

Refining the vendor card information hierarchy

The feedback I received on the initial wireframe design was that, while users were interested in a farmer’s backstory, they cared more about being able to quickly locate other important information.

So in my next iteration, I collapsed the “About” section to make the other vendor details more accessible. However, this still left users frustrated with the lack of information within the prime real estate at the very top of the screen.

In response, I moved up the most pertinent details—days at the market, typical season, farm stats—and moved the vendor name below the image for improved association. I also wanted to clearly convey that the items listed on the page were clickable, leading to individual item cards, so I designed larger buttons geared toward better user experience and accessibility.

THE SOLUTION

Final prototype and key flows

Based on user feedback, I spent time iterating the Item and Vendor pages in particular, focusing on clear information hierarchy that would allow a user to quickly scan for season, days, and other details.

I also made the notifications icon visible from every screen to improve ease of use and allow for a clearer connection between adding something to Favorites and receiving a notification related to the item. The final key flows are below:

Flow 1 | Exploring a seasonal item

Flow 2 | Discovering a new vendor

Flow 3 | Adding to Favorites to receive notifications

TESTING AND KEY METRICS

White peaches are in season. Who will you buy them from?

With the final prototype, I conducted in-person, moderated testing with 5 users who shop at their local farmers market 1-2x a month.

Test results:

100% (5/5) users successfully completed the three tasks:

  • Adding an item to Favorites

  • Discovering a new vendor and adding to Favorites

  • Utilizing a notification to identify a vendor to purchase from, and the vendor’s market dates and location

Potential success metrics once the app has been developed:

  • Vendor page engagement

  • Utilization of Favorites feature

  • Click-through rate on notifications

LESSONS LEARNED

Taking information architecture to the next level, and more

A few lessons and opportunities for further development:

  1. Providing information and education can be key to unlocking increased sales. Shoppers often expressed an interest in purchasing more at the farmers market, but their lack of knowledge and confidence prevented them from interacting with the market in the way they wanted to.

  2. There are many, many different varieties of produce—and that’s what people love about the farmers market. However, this poses an interesting information architecture challenge when it comes to making it easy for users to quickly navigate all that the farmers market has to offer.

  3. Positive and negative states when it comes to being in season or out of season, or organic or not organic, should be explored further. What does a produce item look like when it’s not in season, but still available for purchase? How can we clearly denote non-organic farmers from organic farmers, when no one wants to be labeled as “non-organic”?

What’s your favorite produce at the farmers market?