Expired Food Solution - Fridge Tracking + Recipe + Shopping App
The goal of our project is to help people who cook consume all their groceries before they expire. We want to help people better keep track of the expiration date of their groceries and use up their groceries. People often fail to eat their groceries before they expire, resulting in a lot of food waste.
My Role
Team
Timeline
UX Designer, Researcher
Grace Yim, Tracy Xu, Yichen Li
Sep 2022 - Dec 2022, 12 Weeks
Overview
Challenge
Every year, 40% of the food produced in the United States goes uneaten, leading to 160 billion pounds of wasted food in our landfills.
This amount of waste has far-reaching impacts on society:
Food that could have helped feed families in need is sent to landfills.
Land, water, labor, energy are used in producing, processing, transporting, preparing, storing, and disposing of discarded food.
Therefore, we wanted to tackle this issue and help reduce food waste generated from people failing to consume all of their groceries before they expire.
Design Process
Research
User Interview
Our goal is to understand our target users’ current practices and procedures for managing groceries. Furthermore, we want to identify current challenges and potential opportunities to enhance users’ experience on using up groceries. We also want to get a better understanding of our target user’s motivations and goals.
Our target group is off-campus students who have a fridge and buy groceries.
The people in the group that we will target cook at least three times a week.
Recruitment
The interviews took place in the participant’s kitchen.
In the kitchen, we could observe how they store and manage their groceries.
Study Setting
5 Introduction Questions
15 Deep Dive Question
Interview Questions
Affinity Mapping
Insights
Persona
Create personas allow us to empathize with the users and try to find a solution to their problems. The personas helped to prioritize the type of users, and also gave a clear idea to execute combined solutions to their problems. Building personas gave a direction to the solving process and opened new design opportunities.
Solution Space
How might we..?
Help the users to make overall cooking experience easy and less time consuming?
Help users manage their kitchen items all at one place?
Help users make healthy meal plan?
Help users make smart shopping list to prevent food waste?
User Flow
Design
This app is designed to help users reduce food waste and make the most of their groceries with four distinct pages: Fridge, Recipe, Shopping, and Profile
By leveraging the features of each of these pages, users can save money, minimize waste, and feel good about making a positive impact on the environment.
The user flow of this app is simple and users can navigate to different pages for different actions easily. Therefore, everyone can learn how to use the app as soon as they launched it.
Wireframes
My Fridge Page
Prototype
The fridge page allows users to track expiration dates and avoid wasting food that's gone bad.
Users can use the search bar or tags to quickly filter items and check expiration status. When a food is consumed, users can adjust the amount left in the fridge.
To help users quickly add food to the tracking, the action can be completed through barcode scanning.
Recipe Page
The recipe page provides recommendations for using up ingredients before they expire.
Users can use the search bar or tags to quickly filter dishes by different types of cuisine.
With the time needed for preparing the food, and the indicator of whether the fridge has required ingredients, users can efficiently plan their meals.
Shopping Page
The shopping page helps users purchase recipe ingredients.
Providing a streamlined cooking and shopping experience with the option to add missing ingredients to shopping list.
The option helps users purchase only the necessary ingredients for their chosen recipes, preventing overbuying and excess waste.
The recipe instruction page also provides users with the option to quickly shopping missing ingredients to precent over buying.
Profile Page
The profile page lets users manage their information and monitor their waste trends and statistics over time, empowering them to take control of their food waste.
Food Saving Summary section includes both the expenses on grocery and the percentage of unconsumed food.
Those data helps user realize the impact of food waste and encourage them to reduce their food waste.
Usability Test
Evaluation
Participants will complete a series of tasks with the prototype. The goal is to identify any usability problems, collect qualitative and quantitative data and determine the participant's satisfaction with the product.
Task 1 - View the groceries in your fridge and identify two items that are most likely to expire
Task 2 - Add the orange juice you just bought to the fridge tracking list as well
Task 3 - Imagine you will cook for dinner, select a recipe that could use your groceries
Task 4 - Check how much money and how much food are unconsumed last month
Our target group is off-campus students who have a fridge and buy groceries.
The people in the group that we will target cook at least three times a week.
Recruitment
The interviewer, note-taker, and the participant will do the test together.
The test should take approximately 30 minutes to complete.
Study Setting
Complete the four tasks step by step with the prototype on Figma.
Try to think out loud while interacting with the prototype.
Interview Questions
Metrics To Record
Goal: To find out if our application effectively helps users keep track of the expiration date of their grocery items
Metrics: Effectiveness
Measurement: Yes/No (was the user able to successfully complete the tasks and start tracking the expiration date of their grocery items)
Goal: Determine if our application allows users to complete the tasks that they want to use our application to complete in an efficient manner
Metrics: Efficiency
Measurement: Record how long it took for the user to complete the task
Goal: Evaluate user satisfaction with the app
Metrics: Satisfaction
Measurement: Let users rate their level of satisfaction using the scale from 1 ~ 5
Goal: Test if the app is intuitive and user-friendly
Metrics: Error Rate
Measurement: Record the number of incorrect actions the user makes during the interaction
Goal: Test if our application can be integrated into our target users’ daily lives
Metrics: Fit within existing practice
Measurement: Ask the user if they believe our product will fit within their everyday lives and what might prevent it from fitting within their everyday lives.
User Feedback and Future Steps
Positives
Easy to use, the error rate and incorrect actions are very low, users can learn the app fast.
Like how the fridge tracker is intergrated with notification, so users can know what are expiring even they are not on the app.
The expiration date indicator is effective since it is color coded. Users notice it as soon as they enter the app.
Filters on the fridge page and recipe page helps quickly find items and dishes.
Meal planning can be much easier with the instructions on recipe page and the required ingredients.
The food saving summary really reminds me that I can save more money if I use the app to manage my groceries.
Recommendations
Hope there are more customizable settings where I can adjust how many days to receive notification before expiring.
The app should have a sharing option so that all the roommates can be noticed as well.
Filters on the fridge page and recipe page helps quickly find items and dishes
Summary
Takeaways
If the app can be launched and utilized effectively, we estimate that at least 10% of the spending on groceries can be saved per year. The impact could lead to a savings of millions tons of carbon emissions worldwide.
However, it is still a long way to go to let people notice the food waste issue and take actions. We hope our design can attract some attention and stimulate more useful solutions and technologies to combat the food waste issue.
Through this project, I have learned the power of interviews and usability test. Those tools can help deep dive into user’s environment and behaviors and navigate the proper way of solving issues around us.
Deliverables
Figma Prototype
Presentation of the design concept and design process
Demo of the High-fidelity interface
Future Steps
Consider design changes based on user feedback
Iterate on the design process
Implement the design in reality