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User Experience

From Open Food Facts wiki


What it is

User Experience (UX) Research at Open Food Facts is the practice of understanding the behaviors, needs, pain points, and motivations of our users through observation, analysis, and feedback. It's a decentralized effort driven by the community to ensure that we are building products that are not only functional but also intuitive, useful, and empowering for everyone.

Unlike a formal team, UX Research is a shared responsibility. It involves anyone from developers testing a new feature to contributors providing feedback on a design prototype. The goal is to ground our development and design decisions in real-world user data rather than assumptions.

Why it matters

Understanding our users is fundamental to achieving the Open Food Facts mission. Effective UX research helps us:

  • Build the right things: By understanding user goals and needs, we can prioritize features that solve real problems, whether for a shopper checking an allergen in a store or a contributor adding a new product from their kitchen.
  • Make contributing easier: The project's success depends on our global community of contributors. UX research helps us identify and remove friction points in the contribution process, making it faster and more enjoyable to add data.
  • Increase accessibility: We aim to build a tool for everyone. Research helps us understand the needs of users with diverse abilities, technical skills, and cultural backgrounds, ensuring our apps and website are accessible to all.
  • Validate our designs: Research allows us to test our design ideas before investing significant development time, ensuring the final product is easy to navigate and understand.

Recent findings

UX Research at Open Food Facts is an ongoing and distributed process. Rather than formal, periodic reports, findings are typically integrated directly into the development cycle. Insights are often gathered from:

  • App Store Reviews: Feedback on the App Store and Play Store provides a constant stream of user pain points and feature requests.
  • GitHub Issue Discussions: Feature proposals and bug reports often contain rich discussions about user workflows and expectations.
  • Slack Conversations: Direct conversations with users in various Slack channels provide qualitative feedback on new ideas and existing features.
  • For Open Prices: UX research was led by a volunteer researcher. The work combined several methods, including heuristic evaluation, UX audit, stakeholder interviews, and user interviews with surveys. From this, a Jobs-to-Be-Done framework was created to highlight the main reasons people turn to Open Prices: improving market transparency, reducing monopolies, finding the lowest price nearby (and right now), spotting shrinkflation, and checking product availability close to them. One major usability challenge that stood out is the workflow for adding prices.

A recurring theme is the need to simplify the product contribution flow, which remains a key area of focus for ongoing improvements. Another one is to make our offerings less intimidating and more appealing for casual users, while staying true to science and our principles.

Current research

Our research is directly tied to active projects. The community is currently seeking feedback on the development of the new web front-end and continuous improvements to the mobile app.

You can participate in current research by:

  • Testing beta versions: Join the beta testing programs for Android and iOS apps to try new features and provide feedback.
  • Reviewing new designs: Keep an eye on the #design channel on Slack for Figma mockups and prototypes that are open for community review.
  • Engaging in feature discussions: Participate in discussions on openfoodfacts GitHub for projects like the new web app or the mobile app.
  • Taking part in usability testing: The current focus is Open Prices usability. The goal is to make the workflow for contributing prices easier, more intuitive and faster. A prototype of the flow is planned, which will be tested with users to gather feedback and improve the design.

Coming next

As the Open Food Facts UXR team continues to grow, our UX research efforts will evolve. Basic infrastructure for UX research, like UX research ops, has been developed in recent months. There is also growing awareness of UX research within the community.

Future areas of focus will likely include:

  • Contributor journey mapping: A deeper analysis of the entire process for new contributors, from discovering the project to successfully adding their first few products.
  • Usability testing for new features: More structured testing for major upcoming features like the Open Prices project to ensure they are intuitive from launch.
  • User surveys: Broader surveys to better understand the demographics, motivations, and goals of our diverse global user base.

Get involved

You don't need to be a researcher to help! Your experience as a user is the most valuable insight we can have. The best way to get involved is to:

  • Be vocal: Share your thoughts, ideas, and frustrations. The best place for this is the Open Food Facts Slack.
  • Participate in discussions: Join the conversations on GitHub. Even just adding a "thumbs up" to an issue you agree with is helpful.
  • Answer questions: When developers or designers ask for feedback on Slack or GitHub, share your perspective.
  • Joining ongoing UX research activities: Such as surveys, usability testing, or interviews. These sessions are a great way to share your perspective. Information on ongoing UX research activities can be found in the Open Food Facts Slack #design channel.
  • Contributing to UX research: We are still learning how to contribute effectively as UX researchers while building the processes and infrastructure that will support future research. If you are a UX researcher and would like to help, you are welcome to join. Contact us on Open Food Facts Slack #design channel.

Your feedback directly shapes the future of Open Food Facts.

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Q & A

Q: What is Open Food Facts, and what is its primary focus?

A: Open Food Facts is a collaborative platform where volunteers contribute data about food products from around the world. It has over 3 million products added by volunteers in more than 182 countries, and its data powers over 200 applications and services. It's also used in scientific research, with over 57 research articles based on its data. The primary focus is on data acquisition, distribution, and enrichment related to food products. The goal is to provide transparency and knowledge about food by collecting data such as ingredients, origins, nutritional information, and environmental impact scores like Nutri-Score and Eco-Score.

Q: What are the key processes involved in Open Food Facts?

A: The key processes at Open Food Facts include data acquisition, data distribution, and data enrichment. Data acquisition involves collecting information about products, often through photos and user contributions. Data distribution makes this information available through APIs, database exports, and mobile apps. Data enrichment involves using tools like OCR, Regex, and machine learning to derive additional information from the raw data, such as scores and insights. The platform also focuses on creating knowledge from the collected data, such as packaging information, recycling instructions, and material details.

Q: Who are the main users or personas of Open Food Facts?

A: Open Food Facts caters to a wide range of users, including individuals focused on weight loss, fitness, quantified self, new parents, casual users, people with food allergies, those with religious diets, and diabetics. It also serves business personas like food startups, IoT companies, and food producers. Additionally, it serves advisor personas such as scientific researchers, government entities, and dietitians/nutritionists. There are also relay personas like journalists and programmers who utilize and share the data.

Q: What are some of the challenges faced by Open Food Facts?

A: Open Food Facts faces several challenges, including the lack of a formalized design/product organization, which can lead to differing opinions and pushback. The platform relies on volunteer resources, which can fluctuate over time. The diversity of users and products creates complexity. The platform also needs to cope with legacy systems while preparing for future developments.

Q: What are some of the core needs of Open Food Facts users?

A: The core needs of Open Food Facts users include the ability to choose products based on their preferences, organize product information (like inventory management and lists), track nutritional and environmental impact, share information with others, and contribute to the database. Users want to customize their choices, compare products, get personalized answers related to their diets, and find alternatives. They also want to contribute information, give feedback, and complete missing data.

Q: What kind of data is collected and derived from product information?

A: Open Food Facts collects primary data such as ingredients, origins, product claims, nutrition facts, traceability codes, name, quantity, and brands. It also collects data on packaging shapes, geo-recycling information, packaging materials, and recyclability. From this primary data, derived data is created, including scores like Nutri-Score and Eco-Score, personalized knowledge, and inferred data like distance travelled and claims on ingredients. This is done using technologies like OCR, Regex, and machine learning.

Q: What are some of the major components or projects within Open Food Facts?

A: Major components of Open Food Facts include the mobile app, Keycloak for authentication, the main web and backend application (Product Opener), Robotoff for AI-driven insights, Search-a-licious for efficient search, Hunger Games for gamification, Open Prices for crowd-sourced price information, Nutri-Patrol for moderation, and the Producers Platform. These components work together to manage data, provide insights, and engage users. There's also a focus on taxonomies, product images, analysis (including Nutri-Score, Eco-Score, and Nova), and APIs for data access.Q: What are the objectives for improving Open Food Facts?

A: Objectives for improving Open Food Facts include enhancing accessibility and understanding of information by simplifying the interface, clarifying visual hierarchy, using clear language, and improving readability. There's also a focus on facilitating user contribution and engagement by simplifying the contribution process, encouraging interaction, and valuing contributions. Other objectives include optimizing search and product comparison, ensuring an optimal mobile experience, and reinforcing trust and credibility by improving transparency and highlighting data reliability.

Get in touch

Slack channel