August 2023
Organto (I Am Organic)
Role
UX and Marketing Consultant
Duration
1 Year
Tools
Adobe XD, Keynote, Miro
August 2023
Designing for trust in a transparency Obsessed Economy
In a world increasingly skeptical of greenwashing, Organto wanted to do more than just tell consumers their produce was organic, they wanted to show it. The idea: place a QR code on every banana that opens up a digital passport, tracing its full journey from farm to shelf.
Reframing brief
What started as a technical ambition quickly revealed a deeper challenge: how do you turn a supply chain dataset into a human experience people actually care about?
Solution Summary
Transformed Organto’s initial concept of a “digital passport” into a clear, narrative-driven user experience.
Designed a five-part storytelling framework to replace static data with a more engaging journey format.
Developed a standardised intake process for data to support backend integration and reduce friction.
Pivoted into marketing strategy when development paused, leading EU market research and competitor analysis.
Created internal presentations that aligned design, tech, and marketing teams around a unified vision.
Overview of Sections
6
Discovery
Where It Started
Organto had a basic webpage listing farms and some facts, but it lacked depth, and users rarely engaged. The development partner (Opus) was building a backend system using drone and farm data, but it wasn’t ready. Meanwhile, the team needed to figure out:
What exactly should be shown in this passport?
How do you make the supply chain interesting, trustworthy, and worth scanning for?
And who are we even designing for—consumers, retailers, or farmers?
Research outcomes
Interviews and user testing with Dutch consumers surfaced a tangle of mixed assumptions:
Key Insights
🧑🌾 Certifications alone don’t create trust, stories do: While organic and Fairtrade labels were expected, they weren’t enough. Users wanted real proof: who grew this, how was it treated, what does “organic” mean here?
📱Scanning needs a clear payoff: Most people won’t scan a QR code unless there’s something to gain, either utility or story. A passive list of facts doesn’t justify the action.
👀 Attention is fragile, and we lost it: Animations and popups buried important information. Critical content was either too hard to spot or too easy to scroll past.
🛤️ People think in journeys, not databases: The product’s life cycle made intuitive sense to users, but the structure didn’t. Users expected a guided story, not disconnected categories or labels.
🗂️ Visual hierarchy matters more than volume: The platform had content, but it lacked clarity. Without a strong narrative and visual structure, even meaningful data felt fragmented or dull.
Rewriting the Narrative
The team moved toward something more layered, less like a certificate, more like a digital companion to the banana’s life. The experience was restructured into five narrative zones:
Each section needed not just data, but meaning. For example, “Hours of Sun” became a storytelling hook about growing conditions, not just a weather stat. It was also a big shift of addressing the user directly.
Ideation
The idea of a “digital passport” felt rich with potential, but early versions of the platform treated it more like a certificate than a story. To explore its emotional and visual value, I experimented with ways to make the experience feel more personal, playful, and legible.
The goal was to make each piece of data feel like a stamp of identity, as if the banana had literally travelled and been verified at every stage.
This concept informed both the tone of voice (“Date of Birth”, “Place of Origin”) and the visual vocabulary (stamps, badges, approvals) that made the story feel more alive. It also helped shift internal thinking: instead of just showing traceability, the platform could create a sense of personality and journey, a banana with a backstory.
Where the Tech Fell Short
Despite the growing clarity around content and structure, backend integration was lagging. Opus struggled to convert farm documents into clean, usable data. At this point, the focus shifted, not just on the platform’s design, but on how to make the system function in real life.
Data collection became a bottleneck. Farmers were sending PDFs, handwritten records, scattered certifications. There was no standardized intake.
So the approach was rethought: instead of waiting for automation, start manual and go modular. Provide farms with structured templates. Define what data belongs in each section. Roll out one supply chain stage at a time.
Pivot into Marketing
Context
With backend development on pause, Organto deprioritised the digital passport build and pivoted toward broader business questions:
Which markets should we focus on?
What messaging resonates?
What does transparency look like at a retail level?
Since I had been immersed in the intersection of consumer insight, supply chain data, and platform storytelling, I was asked to support the marketing lead directly. This wasn’t a total shift, it was a natural extension of the work I had already done in understanding what people value, what they trust, and how to communicate it.
I led a strategic EU-wide market research deep dive, gathering insights and synthesising findings into stakeholder presentations and team sessions. I looked at retail dynamics, competitor positioning, sustainability messaging, and how digitalisation was being used not just for operations, but as a brand differentiator.
Questions I helped Answering
What we should emphasise when pitching to European retailers.
How brands like Aldi or Carrefour framing sustainability and CO₂ data.
Where is digital traceability seen as valuable rather than novel.
How Organto can own a positioning around authenticity, clarity, and story.
Key Learnings From this phase
In fast-changing, resource-limited environments, insight work becomes the glue between vision and execution.
My role became a translator—turning user research, supply chain complexity, and digital friction into clear, strategic direction for marketing and product.
Visual communication mattered. I wasn’t just delivering insights—I was crafting how they were understood, shared, and acted on.
QR Code Marketing Video
Final Outcomes
Content Clarity
Defined the narrative structure and key messaging across the digital passport, transforming scattered data into a clear consumer-facing story.
Intake Framework
Developed a modular intake system to standardise farm documentation, reducing ambiguity for both tech and stakeholders.
UX Direction
Delivered actionable UX recommendations backed by usability testing and interviews, shaping the roadmap for Passport 2.0.
Strategic Research
Conducted a full EU market analysis, identifying retailer behaviours and framing Organto’s competitive advantage in transparency.
Stakeholder Alignment
Created internal presentations that translated complex insights into actionable direction for design, marketing, and leadership.
Brand Positioning
Helped shift digitalization from a backend feature to a forward-facing brand differentiator tied to emotional trust and authenticity.
Reflections and Learnings
Narrative Power
A strong story builds more trust than raw data, especially in low-touch products like produce.
Flexible Focus
Great design isn’t always a screen. Sometimes it’s a spreadsheet, a conversation, or a reframe.