A little while back I put a call out for folks that were social media savvy and interested in food to do some interviews for a uni assignment.  The interviews went really well (thanks to everyone involved!) and I’ve been remiss in not reporting back on progress since then.

For my uni assessment I produced two reports and a set of design personas to support the development of the FlavourCrusader project:

1. Local food production and cosmopolitan localism (PDF 99 KB)
   This paper examines some of the drivers behind the emerging trend towards local and organic produce and the related growth of farmers markets: sustainability, health and safety, quality and taste, and food as experience. It then explores local food production as a form of social innovation, considering its potential for expansion using social technologies.
2. Report on design research with urban local food customers (PDF 157 KB)
   Reports on the findings of interviews with 5 social media savvy food lovers who purchase locally-produced food.
3. Personas (PDF 1.7 MB)
   Design personas reflecting the user research and learnings from the initial report looking at local trends etc.

Since that work was completed, myself and the team at Zumio have been working with Sharon Lee, the project lead for FlavourCrusader, on a prototype of the core functionality of the application. The core focus of the prototype is a seasonal food guide and recipes, as these were the core elements identified through the interviews as being useful in a mobile application.

Next Saturday (26 Feb 2011) we’ll be running a session at the Social Innovation Sydney (SI Syd) event in Paddington to get feedback on this prototype. Sharon has done a guest post over at the SI Syd blog about the FlavourCrusader session.

As Sharon’s post points out it’s still very early days — we’re really just trying to provide the bare bones functionality to start getting feedback about what the issues/barriers are and where we should go with it next. Specifically, we’re trying to provide support for the following scenarios:

• You are on your way home from work and thinking about dinner. How would you use the application to help you choose your dinner?
• You are planning a dinner on the weekend, how would you use the application to help you plan?
• You are in a store choosing your fruit and veg for the week and you want to find out if something is in season. How would you use the application to determine this?

There may have other situations where it might be useful, of course — we’d be interested to hear of those if you have any ideas.

Using it “in real life” is obviously the best way to test — so we’re really looking to understand how people go about these things and how, if at all, the app might help. So the session will involve a bit of fun role-playing as well as more straightforward testing.

Our hope is the session will give us an understanding of:

• How well does the app support this process currently?
• What frustrations or barriers are there?
• What needs to be added for people to be able to achieve these goals with it?

In any case, if you’re able to make it down to SI Syd next Saturday — we’re hoping the session will occur just before lunch — I’d love to see you there and get your thoughts.

Iain Barker with an excellent primer on information scent.

Enabling people to find the specific information they require amongst the hundreds and thousands of other pieces of content available on a site can be a difficult task.

…It is interesting to note that the Orange homepage doesn’t actually contain the global navigation that appears on all other pages of the site. This is a point often forgotten on many sites, the homepage is the only page that doesn’t need to employ the same global navigation as the rest of a site.

The principle roles of the homepage are to confirm to users that they have in fact arrived at the right place and provide them with a clear and simple first step towards the information they require.

Campaign Monitor just posted their Email Design Guidelines for 2006. Excellent, real-world tips. The Apple iTunes email example is shockingly bad. How could they get that soooooo wrong?

Just spotted the SMH home page redesign. Much cleaner, much easier to use. One of the best newspaper homepage designs I’ve seen. Looks like their recent switch to standards has paid off…

I wish I was in Melbourne for these. Jay, Joi, and Larry are all there. Update: and Lance! It would be awesome to hear them talk. Is there a podcast in the works? (Given the quality of the website, I doubt it…)

May 1 is Reboot day – I missed the boat with this site, but loads of others didn’t. Lots of eye candy in the submissions. Check ‘em out.

I really like this logo. Not the glassy “Tiger” look, the actual logo design itself.

Stopdesign: Multiple Design Directions. Sage advice – certainly matches my experience. And not just for graphic design – any kind of UI design. The times I hate most are when I show a highly developed UI prototype to the client and then they point out another way of dealing with something that is more effective at meeting the objective because they weren’t involved in the process earlier. Sometimes you can’t avoid this kind of scenario, but if you can it pays huge dividends.

Coming soon: Professional CSS. The book that is. Might have to grab a copy… [via SimpleBits]

Design Eye for the Idea Guy was a panel at SXSW. The link is to the notes/finished product. A great demonstration of approaches to different aspects of a design to produce a stunning result. As I’m known to say: Noice!