Connecting fair trade supply chains

Fair Trade USA is the leading certifier and labeler of fair trade products in North America. In early 2020, it sought to improve its market activation service. Coffee producers, roasters, and brands sought opportunities to grow their sales and strengthen their trade relationships.

For six months I led design to expand the Partner Portal web app, releasing new features to facilitate relationship building and product marketing opportunities.

ROLE

Senior Product Designer @ Fair Trade USA

Qualitative interviews, product strategy, interaction and visual design, usability testing

TEAM

1 designer, 1 product manager, 2 engineers, 1 QA tester

The Problem

In an age when information is increasingly available, transparency is important or extremely important to 81% of shoppers both online and in store. Fair trade coffee brands want to respond to this demand by showing consumers who grows their coffee. However, relationships in coffee supply chains are often siloed, making up-to-date producer information limited and slow to obtain for brands.

Qualitative Interviews

Goals

Understand how producers sell their coffee, their supply chain relationships, and what might help increase sales.
Understand how roasters and brands value producer information and make sourcing decisions.

Participants

3 internal subject-matter experts
6 coffee producers in Central and South America
5 coffee roasters/brands in the U.S.

Bottom-up synthesis: Observations ➔ Insights

Personas

Key Learnings & Opportunities

Coffee Producers

**KEY LEARNINGS**
Most producer organizations employ communication staff who maintain assets and social media accounts that describe their organization, products, and investments. They feel that direct engagement leads to long-term supply chain relationships and additional social investments.
**OPPORTUNITY**
Empower producers to tell the story of their organization, leveraging their existing social media accounts, marketing assets, and stories they already create.

**Roasters & Brands**

**KEY LEARNINGS**
Roasters need producer information because their clients demand it. They also see many benefits from sourcing from the same importers year over year, and it is core to the way they do business.
**OPPORTUNITY**
Give roasters and brands the tools to be proactive in communicating producer information to their clients (and ultimately to consumers).

Feature Prioritization

I led brainstorming for potential feature sets. Then the team broke down the feature sets into user stories. The PM prioritized a subset of stories for a MVP, which I used to begin designing user flows.

Site Map and Wireflows

Wireflows are a useful tool before diving into wireframes. I use them to quickly think through user flows and begin to visualize the basics of each step.

Wireflow depicting how a roaster obtains producer information.

Since we’re adding features to an established application, I updated the site map to communicate and contextualize new/updated pages.

Wireframes

Final Design

Coffee roasters browse producer profiles to more quickly deliver information to clients and improve product marketing.

Coffee producers manage their profile to establish direct connections and differentiate themselves to potential buyers.

Q3 2020 Launch

5

Languages

300+

Global coffee producers

500+

U.S. traders and brands