How Invivo validates product concepts with Maze

Leading agricultural organization, Invivo, holds the mission of ensuring the sustainability and quality of food in France and around the world. With over 5,000 employees, locations in 19 countries, and a network of 201 member cooperatives, Invivo creates innovative and responsible solutions for the benefit of their users, farmers, and consumers.

To enhance the performance of cooperatives, enterprises made up of two farmers that grow together, Invivo founded their digital factory to own their digital transformation—enabling the process of buying and selling products online. “We are here to build the first marketplace for all those cooperatives,” explains Camille Di Constanzo, Lead Product Designer in Invivo’s Digital Factory.

Their goals are to guide transformation by identifying and supporting the emergence of the cooperatives and implementing transformation by delivering digital products focused on client experience and value creation.

However, digitizing the efforts of hundreds of cooperatives doesn’t come without its design challenges, so making the right strategic product decisions relies on empathizing, understanding, and connecting with their users. With the time constraints of their unique user base, the implications of COVID-19, and their expanding user base, Invivo’s digital factory needed a remote testing solution to connect them with their users.

Typically, Invivo was reaching their users and gathering feedback through face-to-face research sessions, running solely qualitative interviews. Considering the nature of their users' work being farming, scheduling times that worked for both parties was time-consuming and often a challenge. Farmers are typically at work before office hours and spending most of their days outside. Then with the arrival of COVID-19 halting fieldwork and creating social distancing restrictions, face-to-face interviews became impossible.

Invivo also experienced an opportunity to test with a large number of users at an event they ran with 600 attendees but found they didn’t have a tool that could support them. They landed on Google Forms, which meant putting users into groups, displaying the prototype on a screen, and having a separate device housing the form.

Exploring solutions, Camille and Stephanie found Maze’s approach to user testing unique. It facilitated remote user testing that could scale due to the browser-based platform, where sharing tests with users was as simple as sending a URL. This meant their users could do the test when it suited them, on their terms, in their natural environment. The team could then see results come in in real-time and quickly analyze at scale using the Maze Report, which houses a unique Usability Score for each slide.

The product design team also needed a rapid testing platform that would integrate with their workflow, particularly Figma, which they use to create their mockups, designs, and prototypes. Maze’s integration with Figma gives them the ability to quickly import their prototypes into Maze with a simple prototype URL, so they can display mockups to users, with defined missions and follow-up questions all within the same link.

Maze enables design teams to validate their ideas and concepts through quantitative data with real users. When Camille, Stephanie, and the team wanted to test their digital marketplace and see where improvements could be made, they turned to Maze to facilitate their decisions with data.

For example, their platform consisted of a menu that housed a number of subcategories, which could present some usability issues. To combat this, they ideated the concept of a mega menu, where each of the subcategories was in one screen to better see the platform's offering.

“To do this, we needed to run A/B tests,” Stephanie explains. “We ideated the UI of the menu doing different sketches in Figma, discussed them with the Product Officer, and then moved on to create a maze. We used the testing credits and collated results to find that the ‘why’ behind the menu was different from our assumptions. We realized that what users want is to simply discover what we have on the platform, and if they’re looking for something more specific, they use the search bar. Maze confirmed what this concept solved so we could move forward with confidence.”

As the digital factory team moves forward with their new user testing process, they’re measuring success through repeated Maze tests. Setting the bar with initial usability tests and revisiting them later on to ensure their usability score remains to a high standard.

“Maze has changed our testing process for the better, making us more rigorous when we’re writing tests to be focused on the ‘why’. Our testing process is better since using Maze and Figma, and everybody agrees with that.”