Overview
The Brief: SecondBite is an organisation that focuses on solving Australia’s food waste and food insecurity problem. They sent the unsold food from the farmer and large retail to the charities.
Now, they want to raise awareness of the impact of food waste and encourage public or small businesses to reduce food waste.
How might we create a tool to help individuals reduce food waste?
Duration
A 2 weeks sprint
Tools
Miro, Google Form, Paper and pencil, Figma
Team
Ivy, Marc, Setti
Deliverables
Prototype, client documentation and a recommendation for what's next.
Methods
Secondary research, user interview, user survey, affinity mapping, problem framing, competitive and comparative analysis, archetype and scenario creation, Minimum Viable Products, design studio, sketching, wire-framing, prototyping, usability testing.
Problem
“I feel sorry for the people who don’t have enough food, but I keep wasting food.”
People feel bad about wasting food, but both individual and small businesses still cause a lot of food waste.
Solution
A tool that motivates individuals and helps organise food.
We design an app that can educate and help people reduce food waste. The feature of the App include:
Display user’s average food waste savings
Bite-sized education
Meal planner with the shopping list
Storage suggestion
Research
What do people say about food waste?
Food waste and food insecurity is a broad topic. So we spent most of the time researching and analysing the real problem. We focus on the individual instead of small business because it’s easier to target individuals in a 2-week sprint. Also, individuals cause the highest food waste percentage in Australia.
After interviewing 6 people and having resulted from 50+ surveys, we found that the reasons for wasting food were all different. So we tried to dig deep by using the affinity map, and it shows that four main reasons stop people from reducing food waste.
Problem Framing
A deep understanding of the problem
We try to dig deeper by asking why with the “pyramid” problem framing technique from Ben Crothers. We found that people waste their food because they are disorganised to use it.
Who should we focus on?
-- Aspiring penny pincher
Tagline:
A money-motivated, hard-worker who wants to waste less food to spend more on their interests.
Needs:
They need to learn about the impact of food waste and methods for reducing food waste.
How to change people’s behaviour?
What stops people from reducing food waste?
We do some secondary research on how to change people’s behaviour. We found that if we want to change people’s behaviour, we need to increase people’s motivation, reduce task difficulty, and provide them with prompts.
Aspiring penny pinchers are motivated by money, but they lack knowledge about managing their food and triggers.
Idea generation
How can we help penny pinchers reduce food waste?
To change their behaviour, we need to aim for the goal below:
Motivation: money & education to raise awareness
Easy task: an easy-to-use tool that helps people plan meals with portions and manage their foods.
Prompts: flyers in supermarkets and notifications to remind users to plan their meals.
Trigger
Sending flyers to the user in the supermarket
We also want to send flyers to the user in the supermarket if Second Bit can cooperate with them. Because according to our research, not many people are exposed to food waste knowledge and impact. We can have some call on action slogans and the Second Bit App’s QR code on the flyers to encourage the users to download the App.
Why design an App?
Phones are easy to carry when shopping and cooking
People need an easy-to-use tool to help them plan their shopping list and provide recipes with left-over ingredients. In this case, we think an App might be the best option.
Feature of the App
Priority the crucial features
An app to educate the user and help them to manage their food
We want to build an app to help people manage their food from shopping to cooking and storing. We had 9 ideas for the App at first. However, it’s too many features to develop in a 2-week sprint. So we use an effort /impact MVP matrix and rate the value of the different features to businesses and users and cut out 4 features.
Sketches of the App
Feedback
It’s in the correct direction.
We tested our sketches with 6 potential customers.
The result shows that we are on the right track with helping people to store their food by storing tips, planning, and cooking meals with the recipe.
We added the “upload your recipe” function. And we deleted some functions due to technical complications.
Design detail
After the project finished, I tried to test the colour with the App, so I added some UI design. I use green because it looks more environmentally friendly.
See prototype
Choose the recipe you like and add it to your meal. Then you can add those ingredients to your shopping list quickly.
The "how to store your ingredient" includes teaching people how to:
Storing the left-over cooked meal
Storing the left-over ingredient
What to cook with the left-over ingredient
I made some changes from the wireframe to the Hi-Fi prototype:
Delete the unimportant information to simplify the interface
Adding white background for the icons to make the icons stand out from the image
After adding the ingredients to the "your recipe" page, if you don't want to share the cooking method of your recipe, you can stop where you are. The recipe will be saved in your account.
The difficulty
How to demonstrate the food waste in dollars?
In the App, we want to motivate the aspiring penny pincher by visually showing how much money people are saving from reducing food waste. However, we found that it’s hard to calculate how much food people waste and its cost. So, we use average data comparison between the user’s predicted waste VS average Australian waste.
What’s next?
If we have more time, we will:
Have more usability test
Flash out more detail of the functionary
Consider gamification for education
Because this project was based on a lot of assumptions. So if we have the opportunity, we will ask the client to:
Consider providing recipe
Consider the social media
Reflection
What did I learn?
MVP is an excellent method to prioritise tasks and features.
We need to consider the technical limits while designing.
Instead of spending too much time solving the technical difficulty feature, find an alternative way to test out your idea.
The sooner to test out your idea is better.
