1.2 billion tons of food is lost during harvesting and post-harvest processing. A further 370 million tons is lost in processing, storage, and distribution. 931 million tons is wasted during the retail and consumption stages. I decided to create an app to focus on curbing consumer food waste.
I created a mobile application that allows users to track their pantry items seamlessly. Additionally users can find new recipes to use up their leftovers in creative and satisfying ways.
To discover the average consumers' cooking and grocery shopping habits, 49 participants completed a survey. Participants who regularly cooked at home were selected and 5 semi-structured interviews were conducted. Here are the results.
Overbuying ingredients was one of the main reasons cited. Store promotions encourage impulse and bulk food purchases that do not fit into people’s usual meal plans, leading to excess ingredients. Additionally, poor planning (shopping lists, meal prepping) and unplanned restaurant meals were another significant cause.
Multiple participants cited lack of visibility in refrigerators as a reason for food spoilage. One said, "Sometimes I forget I have certain ingredients and they end up going bad. Last week I forgot I had an avocado in the back of my fridge and I had to throw it away." Others stated that confusion around expiration date labels led them to throw away food prematurely.
"I just keep track of it in my head. It's a hassle putting every single item in," replied one participant. Others said they only log food items when generating shopping lists.
Many respondents resort to making uninspired soups and casseroles to use up their leftover ingredients. One participant expressed, "I usually just toss my leftovers into a soup, but I don't look forward to that meal. Usually it doesn't really turn out well."
In light of the research findings, I identified key design decisions to address user needs and pain points. These choices guided the next phase of the project with a user-centric approach. Here are the top three findings I moved forward with.
I identified the main tasks a user would have to complete when using the app: Adding an item, deleting an item, editing an item, and finding recipes. From those flows I generated the sitemap for the app.
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Each round of testing was conducted with 5 individuals through a moderated usability test. Users were tasked with completing a list of tasks, and metrics such task completion rate, completion time, directness, and qualitative answers were recorded.
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The swipe to delete interaction was not clear. Additionally, some users tried to look for the delete function in the edit menu; delete was not included in the edit menu.
In the new design, there are multiple ways to delete items in the edit menu. This higher visibility led to an increase in task success rate for deleting an item by 150%.
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Users could only select one item at a time. This design created an inefficiency where the burden was put on users when deleting multiple items at once.
Adding a "select items" button streamlined the task flow of deleting multiple items, decreasing overall task completion time by 34%.
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Both header elements have the same filtering function but different UI patterns, leading to user confusion. Multiple users didn't even realize "total", "expiring", and "low" were clickable.
Additionally, the "expiring" tag didn't give enough information about when the item was going bad.
Both elements were streamlined into one filter with a consistent design.
The "expiring" and "expired" tags now show when the item is going bad/how long it has been spoiled.
This project was enlightening. The non-linear nature of the UX process was clearly seen in this project; I was constantly pushed to challenge my assumptions, always asking "why," and going deeper into research and design.
It is not necessary to be totally original when designing interactions. Existing interactions and UI patterns are often best to use since the user is already familiar with them.
While designing my solution, I found myself ideating very broadly in order to create a full app with multiple features. I learned to narrow my scope and focus on one feature at a time.
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