Trellis
We were tasked with designing a product ecosystem that extended beyond the screen and involved multiple touchpoints across multiple channels. As a team, we tackled the problem of sourcing and managing volunteers in the food community of Pittsburgh. Our solution, Trellis, is a digital platform and physical cart that connects local food organizations with interested, enthusiastic individuals in the area.
STATS: End-to-end 8-week project for Introduction to Interaction Design, with Hannah Rosenfeld and Julia Petrich
ROLE: We each contributed to every phase of the project. I was specifically responsible for:
Conducting observational research and interviews
Contributing to project strategy, communication, and documentation
Contributing to ideation, concept testing, and validation
Leading UX flow and wireframing design
Leading concept video creation and photography
about
For the final project for our studio, Introduction to Interaction Design, we were tasked with designing a product ecosystem that extended beyond the screen and involved multiple touchpoints across multiple channels. The aim of this project was to gain experience working through an end-to-end design process and to use the tools, methods, and processes we had been exposed to throughout the semester.
As a team, we tackled the problem of sourcing and managing volunteers in the food community of Pittsburgh. Our solution, Trellis, is a digital platform and physical cart that connects local food organizations with interested, enthusiastic individuals in the area. It facilitates the creation of mutually beneficial matches and the assignment of tasks, easing the management process for organizations and allowing individuals to feel they are making a real contribution to something they care about.
problem space
Our group formed over a similar interest in food and community. By directing our research toward understanding the stakeholders and the value flows as they exist in Pittsburgh’s locally grown sustainable food community, we believed we might be able to identify opportunities to augment existing value flows and create new ones.
As we began speaking with these stakeholders, we learned that the relationship between local food organizations and local communities could be represented by a self-reinforcing loop.
How might we leverage the strength of a local community to help a food organization? And how might, in return, a local food organization help strengthen its immediate community?
exploratory research
We attended a number of events related to local food around the Pittsburgh community to get a sense of our problem space and to hone in more specifically on a territory. We attended a community garden clean-up, a launch party for a delivery CSA, and attended a weekly volunteer night at a local urban farm. Additionally, we conversed with experts in urban farming, sustainable food, and community organizing.
We approached this research with a number of objectives:
Find out more about the type of people and groups who are interested in working in this space
Understand what these various organizations see as their role within the food space and within the community..
Learn a bit about what motivates these people.
Understand what is “working” in these organizations and to get an initial sense of where there might be problems.
Make the distinction between when community collaboration is an asset and when it becomes a burden.
We saw this research as an opportunity to get to know these stakeholders in a casual way, while getting our hands dirty (literally).
key findings
Our conversations with players in Pittsburgh’s local sustainable food scene taught us a lot about the community, volunteerism, and the problems inherent to hosting volunteers who are not yet committed members of the organization. First of all, community-led food organizations need to get resources — for which they need resources. People are the most critical resource, and they bring along with them not only physical hands to help but also other skills, passions, energy, and more. However, having just anybody can actually put a burden on these organizations when these human resources are untrained or only volunteer at one-off events. Helping these people (in groups or individually) integrate into a community by bringing them into a place where they can make meaningful contributions with a certain level of commitment became a focus point of our design.
From what we learned in our exploratory research, we were able to narrow down our problem space into a more specific question.
How might we enable community-driven local food organizations to thrive and provide opportunities for individuals to connect with these organizations and contribute to a shared future?
Through our research, we uncovered three design implications:
Our design needs to get resources where they need to be. Since people are the most critical resource for these organizations, we wanted to match the resources and needs of individuals to those of various stakeholders in the local food community.
Our design should maximize the value of these human resources. We hope to integrate individuals into communities as they gain knowledge and develop a sense of commitment.
Our design should provide support to local food organizations, not place more of a burden on them.
concept development
We wanted our concepts to cover as many bases as possible before narrowing down to one solution, since our problem space was still quite broad. So, we developed a series of divergent concepts to get a better grasp on the problem space and begin moving towards a possible concept. The three areas we moved forward with were:
Volunteer coordination and management
Connecting space with organizations
Utilizing existing resources for community building
For each of the concept areas, we developed storyboards to illustrate and flesh out each idea. We took those storyboards forward into evaluative research. Altogether, we created 11 storyboards; the three below were some of mine.
evaluative research
We conducted a speed dating exercise with our storyboards, with a prospective volunteer and an active community organizer who also runs a community garden in the area.
These sessions were incredibly helpful for us in getting a sense for what might work and what wouldn’t. We quickly moved on to synthesizing our findings and narrowed down to our final concept, making rough sketches of some of the ecosystem’s elements and how they might work together.
With a rough outline of the components of our product ecosystem (digital platform and some sort of physical space), we ran card-sorting and mad-lib exercises with a volunteer coordinator for a local food rescue organization. The aim of this session was both to get an understanding of how our product might enable her to work more efficiently, and also to hammer out the specific features, language, and task flows our product would need to incorporate.
This session was especially helpful in solidifying some of our assumptions about what our product ecosystem should do and help push us further towards our final concept: a platform for connecting organization with committed individuals and a tool for managing and coordinating with them.
final concept
Trellis is a website, mobile app, and portable cart that connects local food communities with the resources they need. The digital platform enables the connection of organizations to individuals that align with their needs based on goals, skills, and location. It facilitates the coordination and management that often burdens organization leaders. The branded cart is Trellis’s way of advocating for itself and its member organizations in addition to bringing the existing local food community together.
This diagram shows how each of our stakeholders interact with these components across the experience cycle. For example, an individual might find out about Trellis through the mobile cart when it is at her local farmers’ market. She can register for Trellis right at the cart and be immediately put on the path toward a more lasting relationship with an organization in her local community. The cart also plays a critical role for organizations as it allows for them to both advocate for themselves and more deeply connect with their local community.
ux flow
The digital platform is designed to be used by, and create benefit for, both individuals and organizations. However, Trellis was conceived of from the perspective of organizations, with the ultimate aim being to reduce the burden of sourcing, managing, and coordinating with volunteers. For this reason, we spent the most time fleshing out how an organization might interact with the various features of the Trellis platform. Details of the digital task flow an organization might follow when interacting with Trellis can be found below.
For volunteers, Trellis provides all the information needed to complete a task without requiring that the volunteer coordinator be involved at every step along the way. Below you can see a task flow that a volunteer would follow to view, accept, and check into a task. To facilitate easy reporting by individuals, an organization can customize fields that appear once the volunteer has started a task.
sketches and wireframes
While we wanted to make sure that our solution takes all parties into account, we chose to design mainly for the organizations’ needs. Therefore, our early wireframe sketches for web focused on envisioning how an organization would interact with a web-based platform. We then built out our sketches into digitized wireframes that became the basis for the final high-fidelity screens and site flow. These digital wireframes helped us nail down information, semantics, and layout.
We approached the app wireframes from an individual’s perspective, creating only the screens needed to supplement the web screens in telling the full story of Trellis’s use. Therefore, we chose to focus on registration (on the Trellis iPad at the cart) and the task flow that an individual would experience.
Inspired by farmer’s markets, food trucks, and other physical locations where human exchanges around food happen, we began ideating on a physical touchpoint for the Trellis platform. The feature elements of the cart — the Trellis boxes, the iPad for easy registration, the sink and fridge, and the branded umbrella — emerged as we probed into what an organization might actually want to do in these situations and how Trellis, as a physical touchpoint, might be able to support them in reaching these goals.
