UX Research / Technical
Custom Highze
My friends and I created a cannabis recommendation tool to help people find and purchase personalized strain flowers from dispensaries in Toronto.
Timeframe
July 2019 - July 2020
My Role
Principle Designer
Platform
Web App
Design Tools
Figma
Origin of the story
In 2018, my classmates and I created Custom Highze as part of a semester project. After our time in school, we decided to turn this into a side project, which has unfortunately come to a closer. Since this is a long-term project, the data presented has been collected over time.
This case study is aimed to uncover users’ needs to fulfill the survey questions and recommendation tool results.
Defining the problem
The discovery stage of the product originated from our concern of what challenges occurred in the cannabis industry. In late 2018, cannabis became recreational in Canada, which was a huge contributor to our curiosity.
Through our experience and knowledge of the industry, we have noticed the lack of tools to help consumers find and personalize their cannabis usage - outside of biased reviews. We also know the process of in-store purchase is fast, anxiety-inducing, and nerve-racking.
We saw this as an opportunity to deep dive into what consumers particularly need and a seamless way to find strains best for their enjoyment in the digital space.
Why this problem matters
Understanding our end users
Researching who our end users are & their cannabis experience
Our team went through several UX methods to gather data about our users to truly empathize, understand their process of purchasing strains, and pain points they encounter in their process of finding strains.
Surveys sent out to users via cannabis communities to understand who our users are.
In-person interviews customized for each cannabis experience level.
User personas about our end users.
An empathy map to understand our users and their motivations.
Stakeholders: design studios
Understanding product goals and limitations
With our team, we used the data gathered from our users to brainstorm our goals, what the product needs, our success metrics.
How might we's to understand the goal of the project.
Mind-mapping to write down ideas on our mind and things to take into consideration of the process.
Competitive audit
In addition to the audit, I also wanted to grab inspiration from well-designed existing applications that tackled the same problems. I researched platforms that had clear hierarchy of data, an organized layout, and used graphs or projects in a way that aided the user in understanding consumption or activity.
Key insights
After understanding our users, business goals, and what tools are provided in this space, we were able to narrow down on the problem statement.
Building out the solution
In this iterative process, I worked with two other designers to design versions of the wireframes, mockups, and prototypes to test with users.
Stumbles we did not expect
After testing out our final design, moving it over to development was a huge challenge in launching the site. Since this is a new product for us and we have limited experience backend code, we had to scale back on the scope of the product and really focus on the task at hand. Additional features like a user account, Learn More page, etc. had to be removed so we could focus on building the survey and recommendation tool.
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