Yuka example, from holistic to systemic
Demonstrate by example the difference between 3 design objectives: contextual, holistic and systemic.
To show an example of the different objectives of design listed in Design, from holistic to systemic, I’ve chosen a virtuous app and its action in France.
What I’m suggesting are just working hypotheses, I don’t know the file in-depth, even though I’ve done my homework.
There’s no question of me attacking Yuka, as it’s an application that has made a huge impact on our agri-food industries, that’s quite an achievement.
Contextual Design
Yuka is clearly Human centered Design and its success is due to a conjecture:
- a ready market;
- a technology that was easier to implement in France, thanks to the existing Nutricescore, which carries weight even if smoothed out in Yuka’s composite scoring;
- mature founders.
Yuka’s long-lasting experience reason
To show the reason for Yuka’s solid success, I’ll use Jean La Rocherborchard’s Narrative Primitive Enablers (NPE) reading grid.
- the narrative: the truth of the user’s need;
- the primitive: the core feature that stands on its own and is and will remain at the heart of your product;
- the enablers: all the features that reinforce the experience and dimension of the primitive.
Narrative
If we start from Contextual Design, we first define the core user, and then we can give our raison d’être, our narrative: help the consumer of processed food products who is looking for a healthier way to eat.
The primitive
Our central response is to give the user a health impact score for each processed food product.
Enablers
- Recommendation. For each bad score, Yuka will suggest a product with a better score, if possible.
This is the feature you need to build loyalty. Without a recommendation, a user may feel they’ve reached a dead end and eventually reject the application. - History [limited]. The app displays information on products already scanned. Here, too, the team chose to address a real potential user frustration around the score.
- International development. This first step is a product classic. Yuka is already present in over 10 countries, including major ones such as the United States.
Premium mode
A good way to get a product adopted is to make it free. Premium enablers follow good practice in Product Marketing when there's an NPE strategy on a primitive.
+ More than 75% of Yuka's revenues come from the premium version.
Yuka's premium mode is cleverly designed to allow users to concede that they are in a special situation. To facilitate premium membership, Yuka will offer a gamified "free price" (between €10 and €50).
Free pricing is a classic feature of transparent brands, such as Everlane.- Offline mode [premium] This useful feature can be essential when the user has no network.
- Food preferences [premium] This enabler alerts users to their diet, beliefs or intolerances (palm oil, gluten, etc.).
- Unlimited history & no-scan search complete the premium package.
The addition of cosmetics
Cosmetics are clearly out of the primitive in NPE vision, but allow Yuka to accompany customers a little more in their shopping journey. Yuka’s raison d’être becomes: Make the right choices for your health.
There are 2 shortcomings to this choice:
- Cosmetics are more complex to score reliably.
- Cleaning products don’t fit.
These gaps are quickly forgotten by users, who still have a problem understanding the multiple tampons resembling organic labels.
💡 If scoring is not possible, we could imagine an alert to warn customers of false labels.
Holistic Design
Customer lifetime value
If Yuka’s goal is to improve health, it will steer its users towards raw products (84% of users buy more raw products*) that are less harmful to humans and the planet. This leads to more cooking (57% of users report cooking more often*).
Yuka therefore assumes in its *impact report, that it can be a transition tool: 74% of respondents had been using the app for fewer than two months, but were still able to report a change in their habits*.
Indeed, Yuka goes beyond the simple product and extends the experience of those who would like to eat better by helping them to learn how to cook healthily at home:
- Book The Yuka Guide to Healthy Eating;
- blog with articles such as The Basics, 8 chapters to understand the basics of healthy eating.
We’re getting closer to the training that Yuka tested in France with a 10-week nutritional program that no longer seems to exist.
Food at the heart of climate change
Taking into account the limits in terms of feasibility, the choice of the eco-score is not a “product” choice, as it is not very informative and the “environment” button too often leads to a dead end (no score).
On the other hand, despite this, it is a logical choice if we consider that Yuka declares “food at the heart of climate change”.
Changing practices in the processing industry
Yuka hasn’t just changed customer habits. When Yuka declared that 94% users stopped buying certain products, it changed the practices of retailers (hypermarkets) and even those of the processing industries, which, if they want to continue selling, must be more virtuous in their processing and sourcing.
In France, Yuka won the battle against nitrites in charcuterie against the agri-food lobbies. To campaign, Yuka teamed up with consumer association Foodwatch and the Ligue contre le cancer. She also claims to have collected 450,000 signatures for her petition.
Systemic Design
If we take a step back and look carefully at the food system, we’ll quickly find several blocking points, in contrast to the vision of a perfect world where we confront user problems with discovery products.
"Food at the heart of climate change" can only gain momentum if:
- the nutriscore becomes compulsory [red]: several petitions have been launched to ask the European Union not to give in to the health lobbies
- unfair competition from producers such as the Mercosur countries [red]: they do not respect sustainable farming rules. This makes it almost impossible for French producers to defend their prices for healthy products.
- the soaring cost of raw materials [yellow]: this is a key factor in the inflation of food products, especially fresh produce. The difficulty of getting enough to eat in our countries obviously erases the issue of healthy eating for the poorest.
- the lack of a fair price (for our farmers) combined with climate problems is leading to the abandonment of good practices.
Once this observation has been made, there are several levers for action (already known):
- Making all ecological and sanitary measures compulsory for our productions is necessary to better target our actions. -> policy
- Return to healthy competition by putting an end to unfair practices -> judicial
- Progressively impose a fair price starting with a label before imposing it by law. -> 💡Yuka could have a role to play here in helping to spread this label.
- Diversify access to citizen-growing zones and mutual-help networks The collective here could also draw inspiration from old practices, such as the communal oven. It’s all up to us!
Systemic design shows us that design must move from a product that solves a problem to levers to be activated by a progressive set of actions. These actions can be based on products, procedures, services, training, new spaces, new laws and anything else we haven’t yet thought of.
Above all, systemic design shows that we need to measure the consequences of what we produce, rather than continuing to live in excess. Measuring rather than exceeding.
