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Prototyping an app to fight food waste at home.
User Research, UX Design, Prototyping
Thesis project - User Experience Researcher & Designer
Tania Schlatter
16 weeks in 2021
Adobe XD, Qualtrics, Miro, Figma, Adobe Fresco
There are a complex set of behaviors that escalate the likelihood of how much food is wasted: planning, shopping, storing, preparing, and consuming. I implemented a framework to approach problem solving by empathizing with users.
I conducted research into the problem of food waste in US homes and developed a prototype to help reduce consumer food waste. The prototype explores ways to improve food literacy in two ways. One: by visualizing their kitchen inventory to prevent shopping impulsively. Two: by answering questions about properly storing food. The ultimate goal of this project is to reshape consumer behaviour and shift our culture towards greater appreciation for our food and all resources that went into it.
This project all started in the spring semester 2021 when I was working on a research for Designing for Infographics class exploring the topic of food waste. I read articles, journals, reports, and watch documentaries to understand the issue.
I was surprised to find out that we as the end customers are responsible for the biggest contribution in food waste which includes spoiled food, over-preparation, date label confusion, over buying, as well as poor planning.
I compiled a list of direct and indirect competitors in the food storage and inventory market, then evaluate their functions with the key features I envisioned for Froot.
I also took some time to explore those apps to understand the flow and how they work. Finally, I analyzed the customer app reviews to find out users’ paint points and motivations.
I distributed a survey to different social media platforms and communities (targeting different age group) to take a closer look on peoples’ behaviors towards their storing and discarding food habits. The goal is to identify actions that people do consciously or not in perceiving and valuing food.
Research Questions:
1. Why end consumers like you and I end up wasting food?
2. Why do people buy food they don’t intend to eat? What are the challenges?
3. How can we find effective ways to ease the process of managing our food?
We are still in denial of how much food we're wasting.
In the way we shop, end consumers often don’t think ahead in planning and managing our consumptions and we end up shop impulsively without thinking ahead of how much waste could’ve been avoided.
We stockpile food and delay dispose them.
As produced stored in the back of our fridge will become less visible; and the next thing you know food become spoiled and we have no other choices than toss them.
Food is undervalued and people are lacking of food literacy.
Our initial intention for buying fresh produce has always been novel, but due to the lack of education and skills to effectively manage food, we fail to appreciate the real value behind food production.
After completed the survey, I followed up with 6 people and had a brief discussion on their grocery shopping habit and learning about their relationship with food and refrigerator. The results from these interviews have allowed me to find behavioral patterns to understand who our users are, what are their goals and challenges.
I ran an affinity mapping session on Miro board to organize the data, color code them, and analyze what patterns and relationships appears between different data.
Cassidy has a deep passion for cooking and she’s a creative cook herself, but she has a very busy schedule that prevent her to properly plan her grocery shopping. She usually cook meals for 3 - 4 days a week and at least go to grocery story store twice a week which usually happened right after work.
Tonight, she’s thinking of making her favorite meal because it’s simple and always taste good: a meat sauce linguine with onion, mushroom, and bell pepper. She knows that she’ll also have 2 more leftover meals from it. So, she goes to the grocery store to make a quick round to get some mushroom and ground beef for her dinner tonight. While she’s at the store, she also get few other stuff such as bacon, salad, and bread to prepare for her lunch and breakfast.
As part of the Design Thinking framework, research plays such an important role in moving the ball forward to the second phase - design. Through understanding users (Empathize) and synthesizing findings (Define), I was able to gather the information I needed and used that as a foundation to design a solution that could solve users’ problems.
In this third stage, Ideation, my first attempt was creating a list of minimum viable products (MVPs), which is a stripped down version of the final product. It’s a way to zoom out on your product and focus on the main feature that will be offered. MVP is a core concept of Lean UX which promotes the mobility of feature developments while also allows to receive feedback early and regularly - hence increases product design iteration.
My Kitchen Page
Visualizing all fresh produce that people have at home and notify users when food is reaching the end of its shelf life.
Users can also sort the data by category, the goal is to help user find information faster.
Produce Page
Sharing tips and answers to questions related to properly storing and safely assessing food.
Users can manage how they store their produce as well as monitor their waste and consumption.
Shop / Add Produce
Scanning produce with phone camera to easily add and track produce in real time.
It adopts the object detection technology, a computer vision methods for locating an object through images or videos.
The MVP helped to kickstart the design process by defining the main features for this app. The first step is to list down all information that users’ needs and roughly work on the flow of information. My next approach is to sketch these features to get some ideas on different ways to present the information; the focus is to diverge first and converge later.
Then, I moved to Adobe XD to start creating the wireframes from low to high fidelity. The goal is to receive feedback as early as possible so that the design iteration could be done more frequently.
I conducted 3 phases of usability test. The first one is to test out Design A, I recruited 6 people and analyze the result. I identified issues discovered in Design A, then refined the prototype by developing Design B. Then, I recruited 3 people and again, repeating the same process in the first usability test I examined the result to create the final design. Lastly, I did a final usability test by recruiting 3 people to validate the final concept.
The goal of this usability testing is to identify issues with the design and how information is structured in the app. Understanding what information matters for users and whether users could find information they need as they expected.
The major issue in this app is users’ unfamiliarity about the concept: kitchen inventory management. As a result, they found it challenging to perform given tasks, for instance moving items to the freezer.
There was a lot of confusion about labeling, such as the difference between storing and preserving. In addition to that, users were unable to understand what assessing food means.
The most critital finding was the realization that designing a feature should focus on helping users to perform one task at a time. When users are overwhelmed, they will lose their interest in exploring the functionality.
Froot is a food inventory and management app to help end-household like you and I keep track of our fresh produce at home. First, it visualizes all produce you have at home and notify you if produce is reaching the end of its shelf life. You will be able to easily identify what produce you have and how long it’s been there. You are no longer have to worry about forgetting items that got lost in the back of their fridge.
Beyond that, user will be able to learn different tips to effectively store their produce to prevent fresh produce from spoiling faster. The app also answers all of your uncertainties whether your produce is still safe to eat or if it’s time to go.
Through adopting the object detection technology, it allows the user to use their phone camera to scan and identify fresh produce. Therefore, user can easily add produce to your kitchen and manage their storage in real time.
