Social project website

For this final project, Ironhack collaborated with Learning by Helping, a business school that specializes in projects with social impact and non-profit. All their projects were related to homeless people in Barcelona, and their social partner was Arrels association, that‘s been helping homeless people since 1987. It has been very rewarding for us to be able to contribute to a social project that will have real impact in the life of the homeless people.

Our project won the prize to the best project in our cohort, and got to be shown on the Hackshow. We’re super proud!

Time: 14 days

Product: responsive website with e-commerce

Methodology: Design Thinking

Team: Guille Darriba, Miriam Corcuera and me.

Brief

The idea of the social project is to teach horticulture techniques to homeless people in order to reinsert them in society, and for them to grow hemp in order to produce CBD products to be sold (the profits will contribute to the social project), and also to offer CBD treatment to the homeless people that need it due to their health problems like stress, insomnia, PTSD, etc. CBD’s been recognized by the World Health Organization to be very useful to treat these kind of symptoms while not having unwanted secondary effects.

Our part of the project would be to design a responsive website where we would primarily inform the readers about the benefits of CBD, eliminate their prejudices, inform about the social project and, secondarily, there would be an e-commerce where the organization is able to sell the products they grow in order to maintain the project.

Research

Our first approach to the project was to research the product, the market and the users. There are lots of companies that sell CBD products around the world, and it’s very trendy right now, but it’s still a complicated market regarding laws, as there are many prejudices because CBD is associated with marijuana, even though it doesn’t have psychoactive effects (that come from THC, not CBD).

On our secondary research we found that 60% of CBD users were women, and that they use it for different health concerns depending on their age: young women for stress, anxiety and insomnia, while older women used it to dissipate articular pain from diseases like arthritis.

We conducted a survey and got interesing information:

Regarding their interest in social projects, we also discovered that 72% of them buy (regularly or occasionally) products that collaborate to social projects, and that when given both options, they prefer to choose that product compared to a non-social one.

We also interviewed 7 people, and we found out that 5 of them associated CBD to drugs, but we also found that they might consider taking it if they had reliable information about its benefits and lack of secondary effects.

The main insights from our investigation were:

• The misinformation regarding CBD: people either don’t know what it is or think it’s addictive and psychoactive like marijuana.
• Their main block to try it is the lack of confidence on both the product and the seller, because it’s a market not yet regulated.
• But there was disposition to try it if they found reliable information about the benefits. In fact, the people from the survey that had tried it (only 10%) had done it because some friend had recommended them so.

“When I need to buy a product, if I can choose between two options and one of them collaborates to a social project, I will choose that one if the price is not very different”

Definition

At this point of the project, we were ready to define our user persona, and we defined two, even though we focused on the main one for this MVP.

We also defined the problem we were facing:

Women between 25 and 34 need a way to reduce their anxiety but they don’t trust CBD, and that prevents them from obtaining the benefits it may provide.

Ideation

We did a brainstorming session to come up with ideas that help us solve this problem, and then conducted a concept testing with users to test the three principal ideas. We saw that the users needed impact in order to eliminate their prejudices, they needed an impactful website that they would remember.

The most accepted idea was a website that first of all showed the main prejudices associated with CBD, in a very visual and bold way, and then told the reality behind that prejudice, giving the user official and reliable information they can trust. Only after that we would provide more information about its benefits and about the social project behind the website. Last of all, the e-commerce, as by brief it was the last priority.

We used Jobs To Be Done and MOSCOW techniques in order to decide which features our MVP website should have (taking also into account the requirements on the brief): give information to the user in an informative path, removing prejudices and informing step by step; e-commerce and information of physical shops; testimonies of homeless people taking part in the project in order to achieve some empathy from the user; and links to blog posts and social networks.

Prototyping & testing

We designed low-fi and mid-fi prototypes, which we tested and iterated, and on those tests we got feedback such as to keep the same visually impactful look along all the page, as we lost it a bit on the e-commerce part; and that the users needed a fixed menu that followed them along their scroll.

Before designing the hi-fi prototype, we established the Central Creative Concept that would guide our design: IMPACT; and the design principles: visual energy, transparency and inclusion. Based on that, we prepared a moodboard to guide us on our final design.

Then we defined the style tile, with bold texts and impactful colors, but being careful that they would be accessible.

We designed our hi-fi prototype, which we tested again with users and iterated. Some of the feedback from the test in hi-fi was:

• Texts were too huge.
• Colors a bit too bright.
• The users needed to know this website was related to a social project from the beginning.
• They needed to be able to return to the top of the page from any point.

We also conducted a Microsoft Reaction Card test with 6 users in order to know which feelings they had while using our website, and obtained these adjectives: attractive, unconventional, energetic and, of course, impactful. So we succeeded!

Final product

The first thing the user sees is a question that makes them doubt their knowledge regarding CBD, and a small text that informs the user about the social project behind the website. The arrow invites the user to scroll down and start the learning journey.

Next, the user sees the three main prejudices associated with CBD, and an animation that tempts them to hover over it. Then, the reality regarding that prejudice will expand.

Only after that, when we’re sure the user will listen because they’ve seen that their prejudices were not true, we will provide more information about CBD and its benefits. And after that, we will provide information about the social project and the testimonies of the people involved. It’s then when we offer them the possibility to buy some products if they want to collaborate to the association and are now convinced about the benefits of CBD.

Next steps

We would like to add extra features, such as a chat that allows asking about the products, the possibility of giving donations on the website, and we would also like to expand the project to different types of users.

Conclusions

We feel truly grateful of having the opportunity to work on this project that will hopefully see the light, as there are several associations willing to collaborate in order to make it real! It’s been a great learning for us, we had a great challenge in front of us, as both CBD and homeless people provoke lots of prejudices on many people, but we feel that we achieved the objective and our design will convince lots of people about the benefits of both CBD and the project, and hopefully, they will want to collaborate :)

Thanks for reading!