Food Cycle

A mobile app for an effective business concept that delivers produce and groceries to your door along with a compost pickup service–making food waste convenient and accessible for the eco-conscious individual.

OVERVIEW

CLIENT
Springboard (hypothetical)

MY ROLE
UX/UI Designer, Researcher, UX Strategist

TEAM MEMBERS
solo project with mentor feedback

TIMELINE
6 weeks

TOOLS
Sketch, Figma, Invision, Optimal Workshop,
Photoshop, Illustrator

SCOPE & CONSTRAINTS
None, we were given complete creative freedom
with the aim of completing the project in 2 months.

BACKGROUND
For this project, I decided to address a problem that I find in my own life which is challenges with reducing food waste. Food waste by households is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Research revealed that people need convenient and accessible solutions to reduce their own food waste, especially when it comes to composting.

SOLUTION
The Food Cycle mobile iOS app is designed for a dual produce subscription box and composting service business concept that makes reducing food waste easy and convenient for the eco-conscious individual.

PROBLEM SPACE

For as long as I can remember, I’ve tried to minimize my impact on the environment and have been following a vegan diet for a year now. One of the issues I continue to struggle with is wasting food and I’ve noticed it’s a global problem. About 1/3 of the global food supply goes to waste every year contributing to a third of all greenhouse gas emissions annually. In the US alone, 30-40% of all food ends up in landfills, with over half of this waste coming from households (Source: http://www.fao.org/save-food/resources/keyfindings/en/).

Problem Statement

How might we make reducing food waste easy and convenient for the eco-conscious individual?

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

My research revealed that there are various obstacles preventing people from reducing waste, including access to composting and a lack of convenience with current solutions relating to time and level of effort. I also learned that composting is the easiest and only comprehensive way to tackle food waste.

Food Cycle allows people to sign up for a subscription service that conveniently delivers cosmetically flawed yet fresh produce, tied together with a small composting pickup service, upon delivery of your produce box. For this project, I designed the iOS mobile app that would accompany this service. The primary features include:

Easy onboarding

Signing up for subscription boxes can be a lot of set up. To streamline and make the experience as easy as possible, I added the ability to sign up with social and scan credit card information.

Preview and Customize Your Weekly Box

In order to meet users' individual needs, they can modify their box and add other grocery essentials, all in the shop.

Skip, Cancel, and View Composting Progress

Ability to see compost rewards progress and how your compost contribution is helping the planet.
Easily and quickly skip a week whenever needed. Plans change, we've got your back.
Ability to cancel your subscription with a quick survey afterwards so the business can understand the user's pain points and use the feedback to improve.

APPROACH

I decided to follow the UK Design Council's Double Diamond methodology to make sure that my design decisions were supported by user research and feedback. This process included:

Discover: secondary and primary research (user interviews)
Define: affinity mapping, empathy mapping, personas
Develop: User Flows, Sitemap, Sketches, mid fidelity wireframes, high fidelity mockups, prototyping.
Deliver: 2 rounds of usability testing & redesigns.

RESEARCH

Research Goals

Define and understand the target audience.
Discover motivations behind food waste reduction habits (or lack thereof).
Identify the needs, desires, and pain points customers have around reducing food waste.
Understand market competitors and identify areas for improvement and innovation.

Research Methods

Secondary research: utilize existing research such as articles and reports to gain insight into human behaviors and knowledge around food and food waste prevention.
Survey: to obtain quantitative and qualitative data about the individual/consumer and find candidates for user interviews.
User interviews: Interview 5 individuals who frequently purchase groceries and are concerned with reducing their food waste.

Secondary Research

Using both qualitative and quantitative research methods, I started off with secondary research to uncover existing information on the subject.

The most important findings from my desk research were:

Individuals contribute the most to the food waste problem over restaurants and retailers (by a slim margin), with fruits and vegetables making up the majority of food waste (Source).
Habits and emotions play a large role in food waste management, with people who associated more negative emotions with food waste wasting even more (Source).

User interviews helped me gain a deep understanding of the behaviors and perceptions around food from people who care about reducing their waste.

Methodology:

Screener survey to find qualifying users.
5 people for the user interviews, 3 in-person and 2 remote.
20-30 minute 1:1 sessions.
I took notes with One Note and used voice recordings with permission.

An eight-question screener survey was first conducted to find participants who:

regularly cook and go grocery shopping
care about reducing their food waste

I also wanted to quantify what food waste reduction methods are currently used by people most frequently. Meal planning was the most popular response followed by throwing items in the trash.

Affinity diagrams identified challenges and opportunities.

After the interviews I used an affinity diagram to help sort all the findings.

Insights

Convenience trumps cost-savings when it comes to individual food habits.
Some easy methods to reduce food waste are inaccessible (i.e. composting).
Individuals are overwhelmed having to juggle their busy lives and going the extra mile to practice better habits like reducing their food waste.
Users are unable to control quantities for items purchased at grocery stores that are prepackaged and usually the unneeded portion gets tossed out.
People need convenience and simplicity when it comes to food habits.
Plans change, meal plans are abandoned, and food goes unused and spoils.

User Interviews and desk research revealed that following good food habits is a chore and effective and convenient methods of reducing food waste are inaccessible to many people.

Personas and Empathy Maps

Next, I used all of the qualitative data I gathered during the research process to create two personas.

I identified two types of users, both similar in their core values. Both care about reducing their waste and living a more sustainable lifestyle.

Dedicated Maribeth is the person who goes above and beyond and can get overwhelmed from the amount of effort she puts into the cause, but it doesn’t stop her.

Practical Anne, our primary persona, is so busy juggling other aspects of her life, it’s difficult to find time or a convenient way to incorporate better practices into her lifestyle.

DEFINE

I started brainstorming solutions ideas to the various problems revealed from my research synthesis, such as forgetting about food and difficulty or shyness when it comes to sharing food with neighbors.

Brainstorm - Idea Sketching

I ideated on several solutions, some inspired by current apps in the market like the Olio food sharing app and kitchen inventory apps.

The issue with these solutions in the sketches to the right was that they were not convenient, in fact, they added more tasks for the user.

The most convenient and inclusive solution wins, providing a unique value proposition in the market with the potential to have the greatest impact.

The winning solution ended up being more than a digital product--a dual compost pickup and produce/grocery delivery service which addresses the pain points of Practical Anne and Dedicated Maribeth:

Makes composting accessible to those who do not have a means to compost (or it’s highly inconvenient) and is the easiest solution to reducing waste--as easy as throwing out the trash! Furthermore, this means ALL food waste can be prevented, including inedible food scraps from food prep.
Saves a trip to the grocery store, actually saving people (the personas Practical Anne and Dedicated Maribeth) their valuable time and provides further convenience.
By providing produce rejected from retailers for cosmetic reasons, we could also save Practical Anne money and fight food waste in the retail space.
A produce model is also better than a meal model that I also considered because food allergies and special diets could exclude people from this service (as well as the higher cost) which are important to my personas.

Brainstorming the Product Strategy

Something I really enjoy is brainstorming product strategy and design simultaneously. I love thinking about how a design actually becomes a real product on the market, how it could be profitable, what are the success metrics once launched, etc. To me, brainstorming strategy and design should happen concurrently, not as two separate entities to avoid misalignments between the user and business goals.

Key Performance Indicators

Conversions / User sign ups.
User retention (sign ups vs. canceling service).
Adding items to their box.

Ways of Increasing Profit

Recipe blog to help users get the best use of their produce and groceries.
Rewards program and gamification to encourage continued subscription.

Competitive analysis revealed where Food Cycle could stand out in a competitive landscape.

By adding the composting service, I created a unique value proposition in a market with competitors that focus on food waste prevention through food delivery. I performed a heuristic analysis on three competitors based on Jakob Nielson’s ten usability heuristics. I focused on three of the ten usability heuristics because they are most relevant to the goals defined for my product.

I noticed there was a lot of room for improvement when it came to the usability of my two direct competitors, Imperfect Foods and Farm Fresh to You. Beyond the unique value proposition that Food Cycle provides with its composting service, designing a killer UX would help distinguish my solution from the competition by resolving user pain points faced on these other applications. During the design phase, I applied what I learned from the analysis.

Developing user flows helped me define what screens need to be designed.

After defining 5 user stories, I created user flows for the critical paths, or red routes, which are tasks that deliver the most value to users (I identified three from the user stories). These helped me define what screens need to be designed.

I ran an open card sort to ensure the app would be structured intuitively.

I ran an open card sort using Optimal Workshop with 8 participants to ensure the content on the app would be organized in a logical order before continuing forward with my sketches.

This exercise validated the information architecture that I had envisioned which I utilized to develop the sitemap.

DEVELOP

Guerilla usability testing revealed areas for improvement for the user flows.

I sketched the basic details and content for each of the screens represented in my user flow diagrams. This allowed me to test my ideas quickly and iterate my designs faster based on feedback from test participants.

In a series of five, 10-15 minute guerilla usability tests, I tested my sketches using the Marvel app to gain feedback on the user flows.

Test Completion Rate: 80%

Feedback:

2 participants had trouble identifying the filter option for the shopping experience.
1 participant confused the magnifying glass icon in the tab bar for the shop feature (when it was in fact the recipe blog section).
All participants thought the Customize & Shop, checkout, onboarding, cancel, and skip box flows were clear and easy to use.

Mid-Fidelity Wireflows

Mid-fidelity wireframes and wireflows were created to visualize the path that the users follow. This helped me make sure the solution's process was complete.

VISUAL DESIGNS

Moodboard and Style Guide

Referring back to my personas and research, I noted the importance for the solution to be easy and simple. The brand would have to represent this as well as reinforce positivity to help turn negative emotions around food waste into a fun challenge. Thus, Food Cycle’s brand attributes were established as fresh, natural, fun, simple, friendly, and sustainable.

High Fidelity Wireframes

VALIDATE

Two rounds of usability testing were conducted on the prototype in order to validate the solutions and make sure they align with user goals.

Methodology:

Two rounds, 5 participants each
Participants were selected from user interviews as well as new participants, all whom match the personas of Dedicated Maribeth and Practical Anne as closely as possible.
In-person and remote via Skype.
Took notes via OneNote

Five tasks were given to complete:

You live by yourself and you want to subscribe to a box via email.
You have received one box already, now you want to view your composting information.
Add two Gala Apples to your box and remove the black beans at checkout.
You will be out of town next week, ensure you don’t receive a box on February 2nd.
You no longer want to receive boxes, end your service.

Four prioritized issues were identified in the first round:

2 users were unable to find where they could skip a box.
3/5 users could not find the box/shopping cart icon.
Language and information was confusing in some areas for users impacting their ability to complete tasks with ease.
4 users could not see the Scan Credit Card feature.

Successful task completion rate: 70%

I iterated on my designs to fix these critical issues and ran my second round of testing which had a 100% task completion rate and enthusiastic feedback from a couple of the participants.

The following minor issues were found in this round of testing:

The usability issues from the first round were resolved and had 100% success rate.
1 user found the copy lengthy in some areas (particularly onboarding).
1 user would have liked to see a confirmation about her subscription purchase after onboarding (“Would I get a receipt sent to my email?”).
The flow from the Upcoming Boxes screen to the Customize and Shop screen that was confusing for users in the first round saw more success in this second round with most users able to compelte the task without any initial confusion. One user did face some confusion still, but they recovered within 10 seconds and was able to comple shopping for their box.

RETROSPECTIVE

This was my first time designing an entire project and utilizing the design thinking process. It was exciting to hear that a few of the users were excited about the Food Cycle business concept and recognized its convenience and inclusivity for people who want to compost but live in areas or buildings that don’t provide it. Most users were happy with the app and found it easy to navigate and nicely designed! This feedback tells me my solution is headed in the right direction by addressing the pain points defined in my user personas.

Future Plans

Iterate on the designs based on feedback from the second round of testing and validate those modifications with another round of usability testing.
Build out further functionality for the application, primarily the recipe blog section.

Lessons Learned

Follow widespread UI patterns and conventions–don’t try to reinvent the wheel without a really good reason. The onboarding checkout flow was widely accepted by users who liked the quick process, but one user mentioned that an additional confirmation screen would have been appreciated.
Validate the architecture and flow of your application before designing. Ensure it makes sense before jumping into wireframing to save time.
Test as often as possible. Some users were confused by the Shop screen as noted in the last round of usability testing. This was not captured from testing with the low fidelity sketches. I will ensure either my sketches or the tasks given to users are clearer and capture all use cases for the users before continuing with later designs.
Be careful when using iconography. It might not convey exactly the same meaning to other people.
Small changes can have a significant impact on the user experience. I learned the value of A/B testing with this project when I made a text change on a CTA for the customize box flow I tested with users. Although the change wasn't perfect in this case, the improvement was noticeable in the second round of usability testing resulting in improved task completion.

Let's work together.

Get in touch