Design Case Study: MilkRun

Background

When I first joined the MilkRun team in mid-2019, it was an early-stage startup operating in Portland on seed-stage funding. With a mission to bring locally-produced food to customers while fairly compensating the farmers, I was thrilled to join a team working towards more a more sustainable agriculture and food industry.

When I was hired to work there, I had recently been a student at Alchemy Code Lab, where I learned full-stack software engineering and focused on frontend. With my background in both software engineering and UX fundamentals, I joined the company as one of the first ten employees with the intention of building a culture of UX.

Ideation + Wireframing

One of the first projects I worked in my role was to improve our user onboarding process. An idea I thought would help us gain customer insight was to add a “How did you hear about us” button. We implemented this into the existing landing page, collecting data that allowed us to see if people heard about us through social media, search engine, or a friend.

One major design project I worked on was creating client dashboards for new ways to engage with both our customers and farmer clients, with actionable data like direct links to most purchased products. While thinking about how to design the wireframes, I considered the typical needs of our customer base and farmers using both personas and interviews. Through this initial strategic information gathering, I found that an important value for the customers was the sustainability of the company, so I made sure to include data on how much money they are supporting local farmers with . On the farmer side, I included data on their best-selling products and total number of customers per month.

The UX Impact

Following the design of these new features, we were able to gather useful information on where to focus our marketing and social media campaigns, and my preliminary designs for the consumer and producer were included in the pitch deck that got us accepted into the highly competitive Techstars Accelerator. Our future product vision and roadmaps were shaped by decisions made throughout the design process.