Foodinn🥙

Reduce Household Food Waste and
Favor People's Health

Mobile Design to Reduce Household Food Waste

Project Overview

Rising people’s environmental concern alone is not enough to solve the big issue of household food waste. After research, I found out that people’s pursuit of healthy food was a main contributor to the problem. The design process followed the leads of the user’s many pain points such as time, short memory, and “laziness” for that pursuit. The final solution gave a new perspective to address the food waste issue and was loved by potential users.

My Contributions

Sole designer - define problem space, user research, ideation, prototyping, and testing, iterating

Project Type

Passion Project

Discovery

The Question from the Trash Can

I saw a lot of food from supermarket shelves ended up in trash cans daily - I did this myself. It's painful to watch and to admit.
I kept thinking:

How can we help people reduce household food waste?

Is It Worth-Solving?

In short, the problem is huge enough and worth-solving.

💡 Secondary Research Insights

Six stages in order to waste

What prompts people to avoid wasting food?

Guilt 😟
Personal Concerns 💵 ⏱️ (money, time devoted to cooking)
Environmental Concerns 🏞️

The Pivot - A Reframed Real-World Problem Space

I wanted to talk to people and find out why and how I might solve the issue. So I recruited and interviewed five people.

Screening Criteria: shop, cook > once/week

“We really want to eat healthy, but don’t know where to start. So we usually buy a lot of fresh product but end up throwing away.”

Meg

Student

“We eat what we see.”

Makaya

Working Mom

“Healthy food doesn’t taste good.”

Chia

Young Professional

After summarizing the interviews in an affinity map, I found out the majority of food waste is fresh food. It was from people’s pursuit of healthy eating habits, but lack of plan and execution. So there was a loop of wasting healthy food and wanting to eat healthy.

‍I realized that the food waste problem goes hand in hand with the pursuit of healthy eating habits. If we help them close the gap between their healthy eating goal and their current eating habits, the majority of the food waste is saved.

The reframed problem space became:

How can we help people consume healthy products they bought to reduce their household food waste?

Define

Identify the Pain Points with Empathy

To better understand the users' needs and pain points, I immersed myself in their world by creating empathy maps and personas. I identified two types of users: Type A and Type B.

This sums up to following 4 pain points.

💡Insights from User Interview - Four Pain Points

Planning

‍They are not able to plan food or meal plans well.

Busy life

It’s hard to corporate cooking with their busy lives.

Recipe

‍They are not able to find attractive recipes for healthy food that can be made out of food in their house.

Visibility

‍They usually forget about the food they don’t see.

Ask the Right Questions of "How Might We...?"

I asked five HMW questions based on the pain points:

How might we help people plan their meals and grocery shopping lists?
How might we provide people with a cooking plan that corporates with their busy life schedules?
How might we show people what food they have in the fridge and pantry easily?
How might we show people what food they have in the fridge and pantry easily?
How might we provide attractive meal and snack recipes for people who have food cravings from time to time?

Ideate

What Could Possibly Help Jemma and Shannon?

I approach this by brainstorming potential solutions for each of the HMW questions.

I also did some secondary research and had a quick talk to people to pick other’s brain on habit forming and healthy eating habits. I wanted to know how to keep a healthy eating habit while living with hectic life schedule and recurring craving for easily accessible junk food.

Minimal Viable Product: Identifying User Priorities

I used user stories to empathize with my users and identify the essential steps to satisfy their needs.

Two user stories:

User Flow 1 for Type A Users:

Solving for pain points: planning, busy life

User Flow 2 for Type B Users:

Solving for pain points: visibility, recipe

The Final Design

Recommend recipe by what users have

Learning users’ preferences
Search and filter

Help consume what users have with attractive recipes

Easy Management of Ingredients

Auto-generated shopping list
Auto populate to storageServing size

Easily plan for shopping

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Digital Storage with Multiple Ways to Add Food

Multiple ways to add: search/browse by category/camera scan/import
Nutritional Detailes for reference

Visibility of what they have

‍

Meal Plan Management

Customize meal plan with calendar
Nutrition facts available for reference

Plan and prepare with busy life

Cooking Steps and Cooking Mode

Cooking step details
Cooking mode
Auto-mark used ingredients

Cooking made easy

Design Process

Visual the Product and Test ASAP - Guerrilla Testing with Sketches

I conducted a round of guerrilla tests interviewing people shopping at a nearby supermarket and friends to discover potential problems, as soon as I built a clikable prototype from my sketches. The complexity of the system worried me that it wouldn't be understood by users, so it's better to test ASAP.

💡Insights from Guerrilla Testing

Overall Functional ✅
Users were confused by hand-writting. I believed the issue would disappear with future prototypes. ❓🤔
Users are confused by the "+ Add" icons, I made improvement below when making wireframes. ⚠️

3. Users clicked Search Bar instead of the Add button when I asked them to "Add a banana to Storage".

Usability Testing and Iterating on the High-Fidelity Prototype

Before coming to my final version of the prototype, I conducted two rounds of usability testing.

Usability Testing Method: 2*5 people/round, 30 min/test session, moderated test.

Some examples of improvements:

💡Insights from 2 Rounds of Usability Testings and Improvements

Usability Testing Issues Identified by Priority:

Priority	Issue	Recommendation
Critical	Users are confused by the “add” functions on the ingredients page of recipes.	Write out the function of add to meal plan. Defaultly select “don’t have” ingredients for users. Use the null check box for “have” ingredients.
Critical	Meal Plan module is confusing	Have dots showing there are plans for a day instead of showing how many recipes. Have a title showing the exact date. Have a place that shows liked recipes
Critical	Groceries are not organized	Add subtitles for groceries to categorize them. Change ”Storage” to “Fridge”. Show results for both groceries users have and don’t have.
Critical	Users don’t know which grocery is expiring so they can’t easily find related recipes	Have a tag/ filter where users can filter by expiring food. Recommended recipes prioritize the recipes expiring food. Show the expiring food in the fridge.
Critical	Users like the matching percentage but don’t see it in the recipe.	Show the matching percentage of the recipes on the browsing page. Have a tag/ filter where users can filter by expiring food in their fridge.
Major	Users don’t know what recipes they can immediately cook.	Show match percentage of recipes
Major	“Add to Storage” is not obvious to users.	Automatically add grocery when checked or make the “Add to Storage” button more obvious.
Major	Cook now button is taking up space of all recipe screens.	Only have Cook Now on Steps tag.
Major	Description of issue	How you would solve
Normal	Users want the checked item to be crossed out.	Cross out items
Normal	Likes the credit/badge function to gain a sense of accomplishment	Add credit system. Credits can be accumulated by going to events, comments, talking to event buddy, completing new user tasks, uploading photos, setting up personal profiles, etc.

Usability Testing Feedback

I love the explore and search funtion of the recipes! It would be very useful for me to come up with what to eat.

Ruby

Tester

I really like the calories I can see for the recipies. I will have easy calculation of my intaks for meal planning.

Joyce

Tester

The recommended recipies are interesting. I'm lazy to think, haha.

Auchen

Tester

I love how the storage is categorised!

Yaya

Tester

Add Flesh to the Bone - Style the App

To add flesh to the bone. I did some research on other successful food and lifestyle apps and brands, and set the tone for my app - it will be simple, helpful, cheerful, motivating, and eco-friendly.

Reflection

Areas That Can be Further Explored

There are several areas that could be explored further:

On-boarding: It might be beneficial to have a quick on-boarding tutorial to guide users through the process. It could either be a short tutorial or in the form of tooltips & error messages.
Accessibility in Real Life: I want to observe if the accessibility can be enhanced in real-life use cases. For example, the display of the shopping list could be further explored by testing and observing how people react to different colors, fonts, orders when they are shopping in grocery shops.
Potential Integration with Recipe Websites and Smart Kitchen Appliances: The app could potentially integrate with other platforms or devices, such as smart kitchen appliances or popular recipe apps. The users mentioned looking for recipes on other applications, so that could help users easily adopt this app. The users also mentioned current ways of recording groceries, such as writing grocery on the refrigerator. So the integration might help users record things with the least effort.
Gamification: Leveraging gamification mechanisms and components, such as badge system, score, instant feedback can further increase user stickiness.

Potential Success Metrics

User Engagement

Time spent on app, task completion rates...

Food Saved Comparison

Food wasted before & after, money spent...

What I Learned...

Be humble and be open to potentials when doing interviews and research. You might be suprised by something you never thought of.

What could have done better...

‍Guerrilla testing with sketches was not a good idea. During the testing sessions, users asked irrelevant questions caused by hand-writting. The fact the test was carried out in a supermarket made it worse. If I had another chance, I would do the test with wireframes instead of sketches. Or I would test sketches in a office setting with the words typed out.

—— The End ——

Attachment

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Foodinn🥙

Reduce Household Food Waste and Favor People's Health

Project Overview

My Contributions

Project Type

Discovery

The Question from the Trash Can

Is It Worth-Solving?

The Pivot - A Reframed Real-World Problem Space

Meg

Define

Identify the Pain Points with Empathy

💡Insights from User Interview - Four Pain Points

Ask the Right Questions of "How Might We...?"

Ideate

What Could Possibly Help Jemma and Shannon?

Minimal Viable Product: Identifying User Priorities

The Final Design

Recommend recipe by what users have

Easy Management of Ingredients

Digital Storage with Multiple Ways to Add Food

Meal Plan Management

Cooking Steps and Cooking Mode

Design Process

Visual the Product and Test ASAP - Guerrilla Testing with Sketches

💡Insights from Guerrilla Testing

Usability Testing and Iterating on the High-Fidelity Prototype

Usability Testing Feedback

Ruby

Joyce

Auchen

Yaya

Add Flesh to the Bone - Style the App

Reflection

Areas That Can be Further Explored

Potential Success Metrics

User Engagement

Food Saved Comparison

What I Learned...

What could have done better...

Attachment

Other Projects

Contact

Reduce Household Food Waste and
Favor People's Health