Eliminating Food Waste In The Home (Foodboost)

The brief for this project was, “What services and applications can we design to get more citizen participation in the fight against climate change? Since ⅓ of the food produced in the world is wasted every year—the equivalent of 1300 million tons—our main goal was to educate users about the issue and provide them with practical tips so that they throw away less.

The process that I decided to follow was the design thinking process, which is composed of the following phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.

Empathize
In order to understand the problem space that we were working in, I first needed to conduct research. I decided to do desk research, competitive analysis, and interviews.

A portion of the interview script that I used when asking users about their food purchasing habits (along with some of the answers):

How often do you go to the grocery store?

• Twice a week

• Every two days or when he wants to cook

• Once a week she goes grocery shopping for herself (even though she lives with her parents)

What do you consider when purchasing food?

• Price, quality, pairs with something he already cooked at home

• Quality is more important than the price

• Purchases healthy food (avoid high in calories from sugar or fat, with little vitamins, protein, and fiber)

What do you do with your leftovers?

• Tries to eat everything that he cooks (avoids throwing things out)

• In her family, they aren’t used to freezing food, so she estimates that they throw out about 20% of the meals that they cook at home

• Used to throw away leftovers often, but has become more aware of food waste’s impact on the environment; if the expiration date has passed, he will look and smell the food to determine if it is still good enough to eat

Define

In the define phase, I decided that I wanted to find an answer to the question, "How might we avoid wasting food at home?" I was also able to synthesize the data that I collected from the interviews.

In this phase, I created three personas. They served as our "north star" to constantly remind me that I was not the user. Once I had the personas, I also created journeys for each one.

Ideate

Now that I understood the problem space, had several personas, and painted out their journeys, it was time to start coming up with ideas. I did a traditional brainstorm for possible features and prioritized them using an impact/effort matrix. To end this phase, I started defining the possible navigation of the app and created a sitemap.

Prototype

Prototypes are tangible representations of our ideas. In this phase, I sketched out what the app would like, made some wireframes, and eventually created an interactive prototype.

Test

The "last" step in the Design Thinking process is to test your prototype with real users. I decided to have the users complete a series of tasks. They were:

• Add an item to your shopping list.

• What food will go bad in 2 days? In 15?

• Find a recipe that you could use with your rotting tomatoes.

• What was the last achievement that you received? Share it with a friend.

The metric that I decided to use was Task Success rate (TSR). These were the results:

• Add an item to your shopping list. (88% TSR)

• What food will go bad in 2 days? In 15? (76% TSR)

• Find a recipe that you could use with your rotting tomatoes. (64% TSR)

• What was the last achievement that you received? Share it with a friend. (92% TSR)

In terms of next steps, I should take all of the feedback that I have received and continue to make improvements to the app. After all, UX is an iterative process.