Empowering households to take action against food waste in their home

PROJECT BACKGROUND

My partner and I took part in Enactus’ Design Innovation Challenge. We planned to target one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns.

TEAM

Sheena Shah
Marriam Mir (me)
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ROLE

UX/UI Designer
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RESPONSIBILITIES

User Research, Wireframes,
Prototyping, Visual Design
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TOOLS

Figma, Pen & Paper, Illustrator

Project Overview

THE PROBLEM

Within the household specifically, 2.2 million
tonnes of food is wasted in Canadian households per year. Most waste comes from people struggling with their food inventory and throwing produce that has gone bad, which ultimately means wasted food, money, and labor.
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THE SOLUTION

After understanding people’s shopping, storage, food waste, and cooking behaviours, we designed pathsave to address the problem of food waste within Canadian households. Pathsave gives people the option to organize their food with expiration dates, track their food usage, and options for repurposing food.





Enter: PathSave

    Pathsave addresses the problem of food waste in the household by giving people the option to organize and track their food usage and money spent, suggests options for repurposing food, and donation pick-up services.
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    Skip to final design

    PROCESS OVERVIEW

    BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES 

    Pathsave would be the perfect tool to accompany markets within the supermarkets & grocery stores industry in Canada as it is worth about $98.3 billion in 2021.
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    ‍Partnerships - the perfect tool to accompany grocery stores, online recipe blogs, and online food delivery services
    ‍Retention - reduce cancellations that occur with potential partnerships due to product waste by keeping users accountable
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    Understand

    To kick off the project, we set up a meeting to identify a mutually agreed upon problem - food waste, where an improved experience matters. We decided to target the household specifically because we believed that there was a disconnect between the way people perceive their food storage, usage, and waste and found an opportunity to use technology to connect people with existing services to change this.
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    RESEARCH GOALS

    This led us to our investigation phase where the success of this project relied on our ability to empathize with users and learn as much as possible about food waste within households. I started my research with a few key goals in mind:
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    Empathize

    SECONDARY RESEARCH

    Identifying current problem areas

    I immersed myself in secondary research and identified the following problem areas that further helped guide our primary research surveys and interviews.



    USER SURVEYS

    By understanding general waste storage problem areas
    from my secondary research, they helped guide our
    primary research. We used quantitative measures to
    conduct a quick survey with 70 individuals composed of
    our friends, family, and strangers to identify any underlying patterns, wants, needs, and opportunities.

    USER INTERVIEWS & CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS

    Gaining firsthand insight into what users think

    We selected 10 participants from our survey to gain rich qualitative research through in-person interviews. We also conducted 4 contextual inquiries with potential users within their homes to understand their current food organization habits and food waste disposal routines. Due to COVID-19 and scarce in-person interaction with strangers, we lacked access to interviewing them within grocery stores.
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    Goal: Gain a solid in-depth understanding of the problem, challenge our assumptions, further uncover pain points, and discover behaviours and attitudes of potential users firsthand.
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    USER INTERVIEW, CONTEXTUAL INQUIRIES & SURVEY RESULTS

    The key findings from our interviews and surveys established a strong foundation for us to better understand the user’s current practices, needs, and emotions behind their food waste habits within the household.

    USER PERSONA & EMPATHY MAPPING

    Who is our target user?

    After having a rich understanding of the user’s frustrations we created a user persona and empathy map to represent our main intended audience for the experience we were designing. The persona was developed by a combination of characteristics, needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals we understood from the initial research. This allowed us to ensure we understood our ideal user and helped guide us in our ideation process by brainstorming through our target user’s perspective.
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    Ideation

    BRAINSTORM AFFINITY MAPPING

    Identifying themes and brainstorming

    To get all our ideas out on the table, we used the information from our user surveys and interviews, to create an affinity map. We clustered similarities from the information we discovered and identified some of the user’s key pain points, insights, which led to possible solutions.

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    USER JOURNEY MAP

    Creating a user journey map allowed me to empathize with potential users on a macro level while keeping our persona in mind. I was able to identify their feelings during each stage and develop potential solutions to satisfy their needs and outline potential gaps of opportunities.
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    USER FLOW

    Understanding how the user interacts with the product

    I created a user flow diagram to represent and understand the experience our ideal user would have while interacting with the app. We decided to create a mobile application to address this problem because it would be the easiest to serve the user. The user could access the app wherever they are, whether they are at home, the kitchen, grocery store, or even work.
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    I found that planning out the user flow early on helped me make more strategic design decisions as I could identify opportunity areas and ask users to perform a specific task during future user testing sessions.
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    Goal: Understand the various navigation nodes the user could take including the negative and positive interactions they may undergo in order to reach their desired goal.
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    LEAN BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS

    Starting with the user

    We created a business model canvas that starts with the user to create strategies for market development and establishing financial fundamentals.

    Initially, we wanted to center our app around generating awareness for food waste and sustainability. However, from our users we were able to learn that these alone may not be a key incentivizing factor for some people to use the app. Therefore, we also centered the app around wasted money.
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    After our analysis and findings, our team settled on a solid mission statement for the app and overall 4 project goals to meet the needs of users.

    Mission: PathSave addresses the problem of food waste in the household by giving people the option to organize and track their food usage and money spent, suggests options for repurposing food, and donation pick-up services.‍
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    Design

    ‍INITIAL SKETCHES

    Brainstorming design solutions

    I’m a strong believer that some of the best ideas start with pen and paper. So I decided to brainstorm design solutions to explore different layouts of the key features and interactions the user would take. After having a few layouts in mind, I had a meeting with my partner to discuss my top few designs, and from there, we chose the top designs to wireframe.
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    MEDIUM-FIDELITY + WIREFLOWS

    With potential design solutions in mind, I dived into translating them into some medium-fidelity wireframes. I turned them into wire flows to grasp a better understanding of the interactions the user will have with the actionable targets on each screen.
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    Testing

    USER TESTING + ITERATIONS

    Making improvements by testing usability problems

    Time to test our designs with users. I used my mid-fidelity mockups to create a prototype to conduct moderated user tests. I believe a usability test isn't a validation test but rather, it's a test to find problems with your designs. By observing how users behaved we were able to create a much more functional experience for the intended audience.


    Goal: Focus on the real nuts and bolts of the product flow and navigation to identify critical usability problems.
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    Design

    STYLE GUIDE

    Creating a design guideline

    I created a style guide to maintain consistency while designing the high-fidelity wireframes going forward. I decided to go for clean and minimal colours with green as an accent since the app displays a lot of information and colourful visuals already.
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    HIGH-FIDELITY SCREENS 

    FINAL DESIGN


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    Onboarding

    • Show the value of the app through the initial screens and first impression





    Organize food and expiry dates with ease

    • Sync your grocery store membership to track purchases automatically
    • Search for and sort food by expiration date, name, cost, or category
    • Easily check what food you have left and what you need to use first




    Track and reduce food and money wasted

    • Recieve banner notification reminders so food can be enjoyed while still fresh
    • Manage food in the inventory lists that have been consumed or thrown away
    • Track monthly/annual food waste and savings trends through the trends analysis feature to create accountability and boost confidence




    Suggest storage tips and smart recipes

    • Search storage tips of certain food items to understand the best way to store food to keep fresh longer
    • Look up smart recipes for recommendations on how to use items in your inventory lists





    Utilize donation pick-up services

    • Donate food that can't be used on time to a local
      food bank through a donation pick-up service
    • Solution to help alleviate guilt while also promoting
      transparency on your food waste habits

    FEATURE BREAKDOWN

    Next Steps

    01. Metrics of success

    While there are some metrics within the app that can measure the user's environmental impact, there are many other goals to measure such as their savings over time, their feelings about food waste after using the app, and sustainable habits maintained. There are also other business metrics to consider such as app retention and amount of customers using the app with our potential partners.
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    02. Gamification to help users reach their saving goals

    We all know it's a challenge to reach our savings goals. To increase user retention and motivate users to save more I'm curious to explore the idea of gamification. If users save a certain amount of food or money they could be rewarded with badges that could be viewed on their profile and shared with others on social media. They could also receive reward points which could be used to shop with partners. This has the potential to create a greater incentive to save and increase app retention.
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    03. More user testing

    It would've been more beneficial to do more user testing, implement changes and new features, and continuously repeat this cycle but given our time restraint we weren't able to. Based on our previous user testing there are many potential iterations this app could explore:
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    Learn & Grow - Key Takeaways

    01. Design is never linear

    When building things from 0, the process will never be linear. During this project, I found a lot of it is figuring things out along the way and the important thing is to always validate designs by user research/talking to users and consistently seeking feedback from my team.
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    02. Thankful for the power of simple user testing

    It was crucial for me to use user insights to validate or reject my assumptions, formulate a strong rationale for decisions, and turn feedback into opportunities. If we didn’t do this, we would have not thought that centering the app around saving money is what users want.
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    03. Taking my time with the design process

    As a new designer, I find myself getting super excited to jump to the next stage of the design process and see ideas finally come to life. This project taught me that I should pace myself and embrace design tools to ensure the designs I work on truly align with the user’s needs and project goals. After all, good design takes time :)
    In the future, I see a lot of potential for this app to change the way people shop and think about their food waste.

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    💖 If you're all the way down here already, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to live this journey with me! 
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    © Marriam Mir 2024.  All rights reserved.
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