Exploring the problem space of reducing food waste, I designed an app with my group, that allows users to scan items on their grocery receipt and track their food’s expiration date. On this page I will only be displaying the work that I was responsible for in the group.
Food waste is a major issue around the globe that is not talked about as often as it should. Nearly half of all the food that is produced worldwide is wasted and this costs industrialized countries more than $600 billion dollars.
How might we help individuals or organizations, reduce their food waste using digital technology?
The first step in tackling this problem space was to start asking questions. With my group I brainstormed a series of interview questions that we could ask our families, friends, and classmates. The goal of these interviews was to narrow down a specific area in our problem space that we would focus our digital solution on. Below are the results of my two interviews.
The interviews were very insightful and revealed some of the main reasons why food goes to waste in our participant’s households. Below are some key findings and themes that we gathered from the interviews.
With all of the data that we collected from the interviews, our team brainstormed on the type of audience we would target with our digital solution. We then formulated a persona based on our findings.
This is Sam. She is married and has two kids. Every week, she’s confronted with planning the week’s meals, and buying and storing the ingredients. At the end of every week, she almost always has to throw some of her food away. This is a major frustration and costs her lots of money when added up.
With Sam’s goals and frustrations in mind, my group and I came up with a user flow which highlighted the key touchstones while navigating our app.
As a group, we all contributed some lo-fi sketches that related to the task flow shown above. We then put all the sketches together and decided on which elements we liked the best. Below are the sketches that I made. Some aspects of my design were included in the final prototype, such as the top and bottom navigation bar, the bottom menu, and the layout of the items. We used aspects from every group member's lo-fi sketches in our final prototype.
After narrowing down the sketches that we liked, my design partner, Vanessa, and I started transforming our sketches into lo-fi prototypes. Our idea was to provide grocery shoppers with a virtual pantry that would allow them to keep track the expiry date of their food so that it doesn't go to waste.
After our research members conducted a round of user testing with 5 participants, they showed me and Vanessa the results. We then made the necessary changes to the prototype based on the feedback we received. We also gave our app a visual identity, which I will display further down on this page.
When trying to conceptualize a visual identity for our app, my group and I started to come up with words that we thought best represented out app. Below are a list of adjectives that we came up with to help us with our visual identity.
These words that my group and I brainstormed helped us in visualizing the look and feel of our app. Our next step was to gather some images and inspiration that would
