THE SCENARIO
I was approached by a new start-up establishing itself as the leading sustainability service for buying leftover produce from restaurants and food stores and providing the produce on their platform to their customers. They needed a prototype that they could show investors and clients, explaining the core idea of the service and how they would monetize in an easy-to-understand format. As I had limited time, I tried to create a project that followed all the stages of a typical UX project.
ROLE
Entire research and product design and validation through user testing.
PROJECT DURATION
10 hours
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Food waste is a global issue and happens at different levels - harvesting, transporting, processing, packaging and consuming.
Weddings, events, restaurants, hotels and houses are a major source for food wastage of cooked food.
Below you can see the Average Food Waste by World Bank income classification.
RESEARCH
There are several sites that deal with waste food. I therefore decided to analyze them and extrapolate useful information for my research.
The data collected helped me develop a user research plan and focus on learning more about users' relationship with the food waste problem and how it impacts them personally, what pain points and barriers they experience when trying to reduce food waste, and what potential solutions they envision.
Some of the most interesting information that I found is:
- 40% of people consider food waste a serious problem in their household
- 56% say food goes bad sooner than expected and they would like to have a solution to save food
- 64% would like to have a solution to see around them where they can buy food that can be saved and spare some money
Having had more time, I would have certainly also conducted online surveys and user interviews.
As the project had a limited timeframe, I decided that this would be the best opportunity to use a new Project Management Tool: ClickUp (https://clickup.com/). I´m used to working with Jira but I wanted to test a new solution.
I created a small project populated by different tasks. This allowed me to stay on schedule and respect the time limit available to deliver this project.
These are the tasks that I created:
- Organization project
- Research at least 3 apps
- Summarize takeaways from research
- Create Information Architecture (IA)
- Create a series of sketches for the app
- Find a name for the app
- Conduct at least one unmoderated usability test with friend or family member
- Create the final version of a high fidelity prototyoe
- Create a presentation
BENCHMARKING
There are different solutions on the market that are trying to solve the problem of wasting food.
Considering the short time available, I limited myself to researching the three best solutions on the market:
- Karma (badge system, easy to use, encouragees users to save more food, nice interface)
- Olio (marketplace with free things or paid, local community)
- Too Good To Go (Surprise box, partner also with supermarket)
If I had had more time, I would have conducted a proper benchmarking analysis on these three products by doing a S.W.C.D.UX.O. (Strengths, Weaknesses, Content, Design, UX, Opportunities)
CONCEPTUALISE
Overwhelmed with insights, I needed to start prioritizing to form a strategy.
- Understand key painpoints, wants and needs
- Classify all insights gathered
With more time, it would have been interesting to create affinity maps to group pain points into similar categories.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
At this point of the project, a pretty good idea of the solution to create was in my mind. It was then easy to start thinking about the structure of the prototype. Before jumping into the prototyping phase, I spent some time creating the information architecture (IA) of the future application. I decided on the structure of information and pages of the app and I have identified what information is needed by the user in that particular context. This phase was then fundamental later to start the wireframing process.
MOVING TO PROTOTYPE
Before starting to prototype, I sketched out my thoughts on how the wireframes for the task flows could look like. After couple of different versions, due to time constraints, I moved quickly through the hi-fi version that I tested with two users.
OUTCOME
Challenges
Working on tight deadlines always poses a challenge. The biggest challenge of this project was settling on an MVP. Though some of the functionality were not fully realized, the final prototype is a strong representation of the basic feature ideas and shows the potential for what "No Waste" can be.
Improvements
- A better connection between the research findings and the final solution. The prototype can reflect better the specific flows that where connected to the research findings.
- Put more effort understanding the competitive market, but also highlight openings to enable such a product to stand out clearly as an alternative, specially for possible investors.