Algrano
Position: Service & User Experience Designer
Zurich, Switzerland
About Algrano
Algrano is a Swiss startup with the mission of empowering growers and roasters around the world using the possibilities of new and existing information technologies. The Algrano platform is a marketplace that connects coffee growers and roasters facilitating the transparent selling and buying of green coffee.
On Algrano, coffee growers promote and sell their coffees straight to roasters while roasters can source freshly harvested coffees straight from the origin. Algrano aims to revolutionize the old coffee trade industry allowing growers and roasters to build direct relationships and make the value chain of coffee trading more efficient and transparent.
About my role
Our product team consisted of 3 developers, one product owner, one product manager, and me as a service designer.
My role at Algrano was to make the platform a useful, usable, and pleasant experience for our users. Being a small and dynamic team I had the opportunity to put into practice my skills not only in service and interaction design but also in other areas like visual design, product management, and user research.
Some of my daily tasks included the following activities:
- Scale a service from the value proposition to the customer experience. Understand user and organization needs, create, test, and rapidly iterate customer-centric features.
- User research, co-creation workshops, ideation process, iterative UI/UX design, prototyping, developer handover, specification writing, testing, and iterating.
- Collaborative work within agile processes with product owners and developers.
This is some of my work at Algrano, that I can share with you.
Design skills in practice:
Visual communication / Information architecture / Wireframes & mockups / Structure & design of presentations
The Algrano platform
My contribution as a designer at Algrano begins with the problem definition and user research. It continues with the process of ideation, wireframing and interactive prototypes. Based on this I perform user tests, user interface definition, flowcharts and user stories. It is an iterative process that allows us to create and test ideas quickly and efficiently.
Information architecture
Research at Algrano
As a human-centered driven company, Algrano bases its decisions on user research. The research process covers a wide range of methods from qualitative interviews, usability tests to co-creation workshops. Involving users in the development of ideas promotes constructive reflections and empowers them to be part of the solutions that will have an impact on their life.
Especially co-creation workshops are an important tool for us to understand and integrate the needs and requirements of the growers and roasters. I had the opportunity to lead this workshop where we invited 3 European roasters and 3 coffee producers from Brazil and Peru to co-create together the future of a new feature that seeks to make the re-buying process easier and gives both users more independence.
It was a very enriching experience in which we worked based on user journey maps to create empathy among users and identify the pain points in each of their journeys. At the end of the workshop, each of the 3 couples created and presented their own ideal solution to manage the re-buying process and enhance their relationship.
Human center design & design thinking frameworks / Creative facilitation / Workshops organization / Qualitative and quantitative research / Usability testing / Custumer journey maps / Co-creation workshops
Algrano design process
When I joined Algrano as the first designer, there was no design process in place. Together with the product owner, my first task was to create and implement such a process, together with a way of prioritizing our tasks which we call compass.
Now our process begins by collecting both internal and external needs. The sales and sourcing team are in contact with users on a daily basis and are our main source of insights and pain points. These insights are evaluated by the compass team, which is composed of one member of each team of the company. The compass team is in charge of prioritizing the tasks of the design team. These ideas or problems are the sources of my work and it is where the design process begins.
The design process as shown in the graph below is composed of seven stages:
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Discover the problem through insights.
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Define the challenge and the scope of the project.
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Conduct user research to understand the problem and re-evaluate the scope.
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Ideate and find answers to the problems.
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Design including UX/UI, wireframing, interactive prototypes and user interface definition.
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Test the solution and amend the process depending on the results.
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Implement the validated solution.
And finally, iterating to keep improving upon as we go.
Product & service development / Backlog management / User stories / Product ownership / Agile-Scrum methodolgies / Kanban framework
Design process
Compass process
