Prompt
Food waste happens in many walks of life, in large quantities from big restaurants, to single homes not keeping leftovers; food waste is all around us. Effects of food waste are catastrophic and affect millions of people. Here are some key numbers of food waste in US:
Challenge
While I was searching statistics on food waste, I found out that a large portion of waste waste comes from households, and this led to my initial question:
How might we help people reduce household food waste?
Project Process
I mainly adopted design thinking process but since I was on a tight schedule, I didn’t do usability testing for the app.
Research
Competitive Analysis
Reflecting on my own experience, I often forget what’s left in my fridge so the food got rotten. I go grocery shopping regularly but I often eat outside, so I really want something to help me manage my fridge food and reduce food waste, therefore I searched quite a few apps in the app store and found 4 typical ones: Fridge Pal, Pantry Check, NoWaste and My Fridge Food
After trying all of their features I summarized some pain points while using them, which become the opportunity areas for me to design the new app.
Pain points:
- Requiring a lot of input from end-users, which could be time-consuming
- Users need to check the app frequently to track expiry dates
- No suggestions on how to deal with about-to-expire food
Opportunity areas for Fresh Detector:
Interview
To better understand our potential users, I interviewed with 8 peoples from all walks of life, aging 20 to 35. The interview is semi-structured and all the questions are open-ended, just to make sure people could think out loud and share more details on their eating habits, how they deal with food waste, and how they wish they could reduce the household food waste. During the interview, I found out that most of the married people, especially women with children, tend to cook by their own and have a better sense of how to deal with each food item they bought, while young students and professionals are more likely to dine outside, order delivery food, and forget what they store in the fridge.
Therefore, our target users would be students and young professionals, especially those who don’t cook often.
Persona development
Based on the research insights, I developed a primary persona demonstrating our target users, especially their goals and pain points.
Reframe design question
The above findings helped us further narrow down our problem statement, so we came up with our final design question:
How might we help students and young professionals reduce household food waste efficiently?
PRODUCT STRUCTURE
Based on the opportunity areas I summarized, I defined Fresh Detector’s product structure. Users can view overall status and soon-to-expire food items on the home screen; they could add items by scanning the receipt; Track expiry dates of each food item in inventory, and tap in to see more details as well as storage tips and recipes. Users can mark the food finished in both inventory and detail screen.
DESIGN SOLUTIONS
High-fidelity mockups
Feature 1: Scan receipt to add purchased items to inventory
Feature 2: Notifications on soon-to-expire items
Feature 3: Track and deal with the food items
Visual design
REFLECTIONS AND NEXT STEPS
Constraints and concerns
Technical feasibility:
- What if the item on receipt is unrecognizable, for example, items written in abbreviation
Product features and product thinking:
- Lack of error recovery: what if people mark the food eaten by mistake?
- What if there are too many food items in inventory?
- What are the incentives for users to record their food items? What is the rewards for them if they reduce their food waste?
Future steps
Product features:
- Categorize the items by their kinds, placement, and etc.
- Create incentives, e.g. coupons or points if users waste no food
- Add a dashboard illustrating how much food the users have consumed, categorize consumed and unconsumed food items
- Double confirmation to reduce the impact of user errors
- Design more solutions to add food into inventory, e.g. partner with online stores so users don’t even need to scan the receipt
Design:
- Increase color contrast ratio for text, icons for better accessibility
- Enable multi-modality, e.g. build an Alexa skill and use VUI to get information
