Timeline
January - March 2022
My Role
UX/UI Design
UX Research
Graphic Design (Logo)
Introduction
As someone who grew up on a farm, I’ve seen how much hard work goes into producing the food we eat and how important it is to eat food before it goes to waste. After moving away from rural Thailand, I realized just how much food the average person throws away.
The main ethical motivation was to decrease food waste and the negative environmental impacts that come with it.
Context
Globally, approx. 2,100 kcal of food is wasted each day.
30%-40% of the nation’s food supply is wasted by Americans each year.
Up to 8% of global carbon emissions could be cut if food waste was eliminated.
Today, Americans have less time to buy groceries and cook home meals— despite an increasing demand for healthy meals.
Problem Statement
How might we assist Americans to improve their food management at home so that they use most of their food before it expires?
Stakeholders
The younger generation
Young adults (around 18-24) tend to waste more food than older generations. Changes in food trends have caused the average diet to include eating out more often. Demanding schedules have made it harder to go grocery shopping and plan meals.
Big households with higher income
Household food waste is about 30% of total food waste–especially from big, wealthy families. Large families tend to over-purchase groceries to ensure they have enough food. Wealthier families prefer buying foods that perish quickly such as fresh fruits and vegetables.
User Research
Interviews
I interviewed Jessica who has a big family with high income. My team interviewed Will— a UW student who is a young adult— as well as Vy— the mother of a big family with low income. The key questions were:
“How much do you spend on groceries each week?”,
“What reasons cause you throw food away?”,
“How do you manage your food waste in your household?”
“What would help you buy less food to avoid leftovers?”
We asked these questions because we wanted to understand challenges our main stakeholders face to understand the reasons they throw away food.
Survey
The purpose of our survey was to gain insight into which groups of people waste the most food. This research method was effective in generating responses from a wide audience, which allowed us to gain a broader understanding of how food waste habits differed across groups of various demographics. Our key questions included :
“How much food do you think your household throws away each week?”,
“What do you think is the main reason food gets wasted in your household?”
These questions were used to gauge how much food households waste, the reasons behind their food waste, how conscious these households are of their food waste habits, and what difficulties they experience that causes them to generate food waste.
Insights
The key insight I learned was :
Young adults use products quickly when the expiration date is approaching
Large families with high incomes often have multiple cooks and grocery shoppers, making it harder to keep track of food
The majority of food thrown away in low income households is from expired food
A common difficulty in all households was keeping track of expiration dates
Both young adults and larger families often forget what food they have in their fridge
Both stakeholders care about reducing their food waste
User Personas
User Journey Map
Brainstorm
Key Features
Primary Features
Tracking items in the fridge and their expiration dates:
Users can display all the food items in their fridge as well as their quantity and expiration dates. They can easily input new food items by scanning their grocery store receipts.
Food items will be sorted based on expiration date, with foods having the soonest expiration dates at the top. Expired food items will be highlighted to indicate they are inedible.
Displaying recipes containing items the user wants to use up:
Users will be able to search for recipes that include food that is expiring soon. Finding a meal to cook that uses the most recently expiring foods reduces the friction to eat those foods.
Planning meals provides an added benefit while shopping. Users can plan around specific meals and only buy what they need when they visit the grocery store.
Secondary Features
Home page notifying users of items expiring soon:
The home page of the app showcases all the food that are about to expire.
The user does not need to navigate to a separate page to view this information, which makes it convenient.
User profile tracking the user’s food consumption habits:
Users can keep track of their food usage patterns. The app will track stats such as most-used recipes and most-wasted food. Users can celebrate their wins by tracking how much money they saved b using the app. A weekly summary will be generated and shown on the home page.
Sitemap
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Mockups
Finished Product
Reflection
Experimentation is the key to learning. This was my first exposure to a design problem. For each step of process, I had to explore each step of the design process, which often meant rapid experimentation. The faster I could experiment, the more quickly I picked up the process.
Understand the competition. One area that could use more attention is researching available competing products that exist for the existing problem. There’s a lot to learn from existing products that exist. In order for our solution to stand out, understanding what my competition does well (and what it’s lacking) is important.
Simpler is often better. The “recipe of the day” screen ended up being too noisy because 10 different recipes are shown in the same location. On future iterations of this project, I’d want to bias towards showing only the important information on the screen