Safe meat
Building a Trustworthy and Compliant Network for Meat Trading
Overview
As food safety concerns become more prominent, consumers are demanding higher standards for meat quality and safety. To address issues like information asymmetry and regulatory challenges in meat trading markets, Changsha Bank has partnered with Hunan Changyin Digital Technology Co., Ltd. to launch the “Safe Meat Smart Trading Service Platform.” This initiative creates a smart trading platform that connects meat vendors, meat-consuming entities, and market regulators. By utilizing digital solutions, the project aims to solve core industry problems, including fragmented workflows, inefficient oversight, and complicated transaction processes—ultimately establishing a transparent, trustworthy, and efficient new ecosystem for compliance-driven trading.
Timeframe
4 Weeks
My Role
Research, UX/UI & IA Design, Branding, Prototyping + Testing
Tools
Figma, photoshop, wps
Complexity: Balancing the unique demands of three distinct user groups: Suppliers (efficiency), Regulators (oversight/control), and Consumer Entities (compliant).
Habit Transformation: How to encourage users in traditional industries to accept and trust entirely new online transaction and regulatory models.
Technology Integration: Seamlessly combining multiple functions—payment, traceability, and oversight—into a smooth, integrated experience.
Challenge
Objective
For Purchasers: Deliver a transaction experience that's more convenient than in-store and offers faster settlement.
For Regulators: Provide real-time, intuitive data dashboards, shifting from reactive troubleshooting to proactive intervention.
For the Platform: To establish a closed-loop trust system connecting three parties (entity compliance, supplier efficiency, and regulatory decision-making) to ultimately increase platform usage and transaction volume.
Competitive Market Analysis
I analyzed key products both inside and outside the industry to identify our competitive advantages. The focus was on understanding their strengths and weaknesses and finding opportunities to deliver an exceptional user experience.
Conclusion
Our platform stands out by focusing exclusively on the meat supply chain, unifying procurement, supply, supervision, and traceability into a smooth, comprehensive experience—a significant market gap left by general B2B platforms and regulatory-only government systems.
User Research
The platform architecture is segmented into the 'Merchant End' and the 'Regulatory End'. While the complete business ecosystem involves multiple stakeholders, this study was scoped to rapidly validate the platform's core value by focusing on the critical closed loop driving trust: the collaborative workflow between institutional purchasers (e.g., school cafeterias) utilizing the Merchant End and market regulators utilizing the Regulatory End.
Fragmented Processes: Users handle multiple offline steps and systems for a single task (e.g., procurement, supervision).
Information Opacity: Critical data such as transaction status and inspection records are not updated in real-time, creating blind spots.
High Operational Burden: Regulatory processes and procurement operations rely heavily on manual execution and paper-based workflows, resulting in low efficiency and high error rates.
Key Points
Digitize & Standardize Role-Specific Workflows: Build end-to-end digital workflows for each core role, transforming fragmented offline steps into cohesive online processes.
Ensure Real-Time Data Visibility & Traceability: Automatically make critical data (e.g., order status, e-certificates) visible and up to date, ensuring transparency for all relevant parties.
Connect & Synchronize Multi-Role Processes: Use system design to automatically synchronize key actions and status across roles, eliminating manual handoffs and checks.
What should we do?
Design Principles
Based on the analysis above, I have established these principles for the entire design process.
Focused
Build dedicated, end-to-end task flows for each role.
Transparent
Automatically surface critical data and status to build verifiable trust.
Connected
Synchronize actions across roles to enable system-driven collaboration.
Information Architecture
After defining user and business objectives, we translate complex business requirements into intuitive product modules using a well-structured information architecture. This ensures the design direction aligns closely with strategic priorities and provides a solid foundation for future process and interface design.
User Flow
Before delving into the detailed design, I first outlined the core user flow. The primary goal was to establish a clear, reliable, and interconnected collaborative path for Purchasers, Regulators, allowing us to rapidly validate the platform's core value. This foundation ensures the smooth flow of traceability, transaction, and regulatory data, thus laying the groundwork for the overall trust system.
Taking the merchant procurement process as an example—this flow highlights the main path for the purchasing entity (e.g., school cafeteria) to complete a procurement transaction, illustrating the entire closed loop from initiation to settlement.
Taking the core regulatory workflow as an example—this process captures the main cycle of a regulator's daily tasks, covering everything from overall monitoring to specific execution and review.
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
Using the merchant procurement process as an example—after defining the workflow and architecture, I started with a mid-fidelity wireframe, focusing on exploring the clearest information layout and interaction framework. This wireframe aims to validate the operational path for the ‘Procurement’ function, ensuring complex business logic translates into an intuitive user interface, laying a solid foundation for subsequent design iterations.
Using the core regulatory workflow as an example— after clarifying the workflow, I used mid-fidelity wireframes to focus on the layout and interaction framework for early warning monitoring and verification tasks. This design aims to validate the operational path of the “monitoring-verification-recording” closed loop, ensuring complex regulatory rules are translated into a clear and intuitive user interface.
Branding
Before proceeding with high-fidelity design, I first developed a Mood Board centered around core keywords such as “freshness, reliability, reassurance, and health,” clearly defining the perceptual direction the brand needed to communicate. Based on this, I established a set of Visual Guidelines covering both the Purchaser and Regulator ends, specifying the color palette, typography hierarchy, and component styles. The design incorporates visual elements reflecting the connection between “meat products” and ‘tableware’ (e.g., a warm, meat-inspired color scheme and minimalist tableware icons). This confers the platform a visual identity of “professional trustworthiness and transparent reassurance,” ensuring a consistent user experience while reinforcing brand recognition for the “Safe Meat” intelligent trading service.
High-fidelity
Based on the branding design, I ultimately delivered high-fidelity mockups. During this phase, I thoroughly integrated and adapted Changsha Bank's brand elements, refining a solution that is both professionally reliable and intuitively user-friendly through clear visual hierarchies, immediate operational feedback, and data visualization. This resulted in a vivid presentation of the “Safe Meat” platform's intelligence and trustworthiness.
Internal Testing
To validate the feasibility of the design concept during the early development phase, we organized a cross-functional internal heuristic evaluation. I invited product managers and development engineers to systematically review the prototype focused on the core scenario of ‘merchant procurement’. Our goal was to identify potential workflow obstacles, ensure the rigor of business logic, and clarify interactions, thereby reducing risks during development.
Review Scenario
You are a school cafeteria purchaser who needs to procure 50 kilograms of pork today. Please begin on the platform homepage and complete the creation and submission of this procurement order.
“Is the procurement entry point intuitive?”
“Is the product addition process smooth?”
“After placing an order, is the associated e-quarantine certificate information easily accessible and verifiable?””
Task1
All participants quickly located and accessed the procurement module from the homepage, finding the menu design intuitive for business tasks. They successfully created an order for 50 kilograms of pork without any issues.
Task2
The product addition process is widely considered smooth and efficient. The search and selection steps are clearly outlined, with necessary information presented logically and a simple operational flow.
Task3
Regarding the verification process for e-certificates, all reviewers could easily locate the relevant information. They found it sufficient for compliance verification and required no additional explanation.
Review Feedback
Practicality—The procurement flow is highly practical for key business scenarios. Colleagues confirmed that directly linking e-certificates in orders “significantly streamlined cumbersome offline procedures.”
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Clarity—Components and states are well-defined, making development easier.
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Consistent Design—The design appears professional and dependable, conveying a strong sense of ‘reliability’. The electronic ledger balance is immediately visible, making it especially easy for merchants to manage funds.
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Summary & Impact
1. Translating Vague Goals into Concrete Solutions:
We successfully translated the vague goal of “building trust” into tangible experiences centered around the ‘Electronic Quarantine Ticket’ and ‘Electronic Ledger Book.’ Internal heuristic reviews confirmed the solution's logical coherence and user experience, with participants emphasizing the “thoroughness” of the procurement process and the “user-friendliness/clarity” of the interface components.
2. Pre-emptive Validation and Solution Optimization:
Through cross-functional review sessions, we proactively improved the order procurement path (e.g., ledger bookkeeping). This validates that structured internal feedback—even without formal testing—remains an effective way to ensure design feasibility and business alignment.
3. Codifying Critical Design Paradigms:
The project successfully validated a key paradigm: "Resolving role conflicts through experiential isolation, and ensuring compliance while building trust by embedding rules directly into core workflows." This provides a clear methodology for designing complex systems that meet stringent regulatory requirements without compromising user experience.