Social project website
By: Paula Monteagudo
Tags: Ironhack, UX Research, UX, UX Design, Social Change

For this final project, Ironhack collaborated with Learning by Helping, a business school that specializes in projects with social impact and non-profit. All their projects were related to homeless people in Barcelona, and their social partner was Arrels association, that‘s been helping homeless people since 1987. It has been very rewarding for us to be able to contribute to a social project that will have real impact in the life of the homeless people.

Our project won the prize to the best project in our cohort, and got to be shown on the Hackshow. We’re super proud!

Time: 14 days

Product: responsive website with e-commerce

Methodology: Design Thinking

Team: Guille Darriba, Miriam Corcuera and me.

Brief

The idea of the social project is to teach horticulture techniques to homeless people in order to reinsert them in society, and for them to grow hemp in order to produce CBD products to be sold (the profits will contribute to the social project), and also to offer CBD treatment to the homeless people that need it due to their health problems like stress, insomnia, PTSD, etc. CBD’s been recognized by the World Health Organization to be very useful to treat these kind of symptoms while not having unwanted secondary effects.

Our part of the project would be to design a responsive website where we would primarily inform the readers about the benefits of CBD, eliminate their prejudices, inform about the social project and, secondarily, there would be an e-commerce where the organization is able to sell the products they grow in order to maintain the project.

Research

Our first approach to the project was to research the product, the market and the users. There are lots of companies that sell CBD products around the world, and it’s very trendy right now, but it’s still a complicated market regarding laws, as there are many prejudices because CBD is associated with marijuana, even though it doesn’t have psychoactive effects (that come from THC, not CBD).

On our secondary research we found that 60% of CBD users were women, and that they use it for different health concerns depending on their age: young women for stress, anxiety and insomnia, while older women used it to dissipate articular pain from diseases like arthritis.

We conducted a survey and got interesing information:

Regarding their interest in social projects, we also discovered that 72% of them buy (regularly or occasionally) products that collaborate to social projects, and that when given both options, they prefer to choose that product compared to a non-social one.

We also interviewed 7 people, and we found out that 5 of them associated CBD to drugs, but we also found that they might consider taking it if they had reliable information about its benefits and lack of secondary effects.

The main insights from our investigation were:

The misinformation regarding CBD: people either don’t know what it is or think it’s addictive and psychoactive like marijuana.

Their main block to try it is the lack of confidence on both the product and the seller, because it’s a market not yet regulated.

But there was disposition to try it if they found reliable information about the benefits. In fact, the people from the survey that had tried it (only 10%) had done it because some friend had recommended them so.

“When I need to buy a product, if I can choose between two options and one of them collaborates to a social project, I will choose that one if the price is not very different”

Definition

At this point of the project, we were ready to define our user persona, and we defined two, even though we focused on the main one for this MVP.