Next Mobile app – results of our co-construction
Over the past several months, our community has been hard at work together, generating ideas, discussing them, giving our opinions through polls – all on the subject of the future of our mobile app.
The aim: how can the app help Open Food Facts have a bigger reach & impact in promoting food transparency around the world ?
Full discussion in this Forum post: Towards 1 million users (and beyond) for the Open Food Facts mobile app
Brainstorming
The first phase, brainstorming for new ideas, apart from being truly creative, with a nice whiteboard, was very encouraging. It was nice to meet people in a very different context who care about food transparency and the solutions it could bring to a large public. We held six creativity meetings but also got suggestions through other means.
Organising ideas
The last part, grouping ideas in coherent tracks was quite challenging. After some hemming and hawing, and three sessions, we finally delineated 5 tracks to study in order to consolidate a possible roadmap.
Exploring
Then small groups carefully studied each track, this was tough work. We also organized a small user survey to have some more data to help ground the studies.
Asking the community
Finally came the time of choice, where we asked the community about their preferences.
The results we present here are somewhat skewed as a lot of respondents are older, however, we studied if a regularisation on age would change the results, but there are no significant changes, hence we kept original results.
The survey results per track are available as a PDF.
We have to say it was really a tied match as most of the proposals were welcomed. This is an interesting signal that we have many possibilities. That said, for the near future, we had to choose one !
The chosen ones 🙂
The two most wanted tracks are “track 2 – personal mobile app” and “track 6 – improve current app”. To correspond to this, here is the short term roadmap we propose:
- we will work on a redesign of the product page layout to help users find what they are looking for more easily. It will also open the road to more customisation in the future.
- we will try to make food preferences more accessible & engaging. We will also support adding specific ingredients users want to avoid.
- we will add a quick scan mode to enter a set of products (for example the ones you just bought). Attention will be given to make it efficient to use.
- From that we will provide insights like for example the Nutri-score or Eco-score distribution. Helping people be more aware of their consumption.
- we will continue to improve the way information is displayed with education in mind.
In parallel, we are redesigning the search engine which will also improve experience in the mobile app.
We are thrilled to make these improvements and it has already started.
We would be delighted to have your help ! Do not hesitate to join our community (either in conversations on our Slack or Forum spaces, or by signing up to our Contributor Skill Pool.