Pantry

Mobile App Reducing Household Food Waste

Project Type
HCDE 318 Course
User- Centered Design
My Role
User Researcher
Product Designer
Contribution
User interview
User journey mapping
Ideation
Paper prototype
High-fidelity prototype
Interaction design
Tools
Figma
Miro
Duration
10 Weeks
OVERVIEW
Background

Poor food management is a huge contributor of food spoilage and food waste at home. Consumer purchases can be unplanned and motivated to buy in bulk to be cheaper on per-unit costs. Without the knowledge to repurpose ingredients and misunderstanding date labels, we wanted to learn:

How might we help college students reduce food waste in the household?

PRODUCT PREVIEW
RESEARCH
Secondary Research

We started secondary research on food waste in American households and general consumer shopping and cooking behavior. According to a survey of 1,087 respondents by Impulse Research, 66% cited supermarket visits as more time-consuming than any other household task. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, those aged 18 years & over spend 37 minutes in food preparation & cleanup. Overall, Americans are spending a lot of time cooking and grocery shopping.

Interview
Reframe Design Question
We conducted a total of 4 face-to-face interviews with young adults, primarily college students aged 20-25. ​All participantsexpressed that they want to save money from eating out and cook at home.

The above findings led us to reframe the question:

How might we help college students discover recipes and keep track of their food to save money and reduce waste?

DESIGN
Ideation

In brainstorming our solution, we wanted our solution to cover 2 main functions:

01

A food management system where users keep track of ingredients and their expiration dates, so they know what to use and buy at the grocery store to prevent overspending and reduce amount of time to check the fridge.

02

A recipe page highlighting quick and easy dishes based on their inventory items to reduce amount of time spent in the kitchen knowing what is available.

High-Fidelity Prototype
High Fidelity Prototype
Feature 1: Scanning grocery receipts to inventory

Take a photo of receipt of grocery items

Confirm and add grocery items to pantry inventory

Feature 3: Suggest recipes based on what's your inventory

View your existing pantry inventory items

Tap "Discover" and show recipes based on that list

Paper Prototype
Feature 2: Adding recipe ingredients to shopping list

Tap an ingredient to select it

Tap "Send to Shopping List" to add to shopping list

Shopping list has newly added ingredients

Visual Styles Guide
KEY TAKEAWAYS & NEXT STEPS
Better Communication

Communication of expectations and app functions often created misunderstandings between group members, which became more difficult due to mixed virtual and in person meetings. For instance, there was confusion with the onboarding design mockups. One person went ahead and create a design without asking the others for input. In hindsight, we should have incorporated parallel prototyping into our entire wireframe. This would let all members have an involvement to all aspects of the design and then come to a consensus of which design to go with.

Conduct More Interviews
Participants were selected for interview based on convenience sampling and often close friends to team members. This would open up to biased answers in collected data and what improvements were made during design.

To mitigate this, we should recruit participants better defined as our target user group rather than friends. Also, based on Jakob Nielsen and Tom Landauer's finding that testing with 5 people uncovered 85% of the usability issues, we would like to increase the number of interviews and usability tests to 5 to better understand our users.
Concerns
Technological Feasibility
1. The barcode scan can be susceptible to mislabeling grocery items. How will the user catch all errors on a large grocery receipt?

Product Features & Thinking
1. Expiration dates are based on whether the item is unopened. How can the user track expiration for opened and cooked foods?
2. There are no incentives for the user to keep logging their items. Why should the user continue to log items when it starts to become too time consuming?

Let's Connect

LINKEDINEMAIL