Case study: Designing a tool to help users reduce food waste
Overview
Wasteless was the result of a design challenge for our final project in the UX Design bootcamp at the University of Texas. The brief was to identify a problem and create a solution that is mission-driven and impactful.
To settle on an issue that we wanted to solve, our team went through a brainstorming and dot voting exercise and landed on food waste. The initial desk research helped us learn that 30 - 40% of food in the US ends up in the landfill. Drilling down deeper, we found that household food waste is the most significant source, contributing to 43% of total food waste in America.
My Role: UX Designer involved in research, content writing and designing the landing page as part of a team of five
Timeline & Scope: July 10-28, 2021
Our team took Wasteless from an idea phase to a functional prototype within the three-week period, applying Agile project management techniques to arrive to an MVP that we could present.
Tools: Miro, Otter.ai, Figma, inVision, Zoom, Google Forms, Trello, Usabilityhub.com, Bootstrap 5.0, pen & paper
The problem:
About 80% of people throw out perfectly good food because they misjudge its freshness or the time it takes to go bad. That is especially true when it comes to hyper-perishable items like greens, fruit, mushrooms or bread. The USDA estimates that the total annual cost of wasted food is $240 billion or $1,886 per household (Forbes), with an impact on the entire supply chain.Over the last decades there has been almost no innovation happening in food storage and few solutions were developed to help people reduce household waste.
The solution:
Wasteless is a complete food waste reduction system that helps people store, track and use the food they buy in an effort to reduce waste. At its core lies a smart storage container which incorporates an MIT-designed microchip that measures gas buildup from food, as well as RFID technology. Through a mobile app, users can keep track of data measured by the microchip in each container and know ahead of time when their food items are going bad. The role of the app is to help build accountability in a delightful way: positive nudges to take action, easy-to-process solutions, access to educational content tailored to user behavior and a waste tracker to measure impact.
Digging deeper into research
The desk research data we collected helped us develop a user research plan and focus our questions 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.
While there are impactful steps households can take to reduce their food waste, our group hypothesized that 1) a lack of knowledge, 2) perceived barriers to entry and 3) a lack of resources in their area are keeping consumers from taking steps toward reducing/managing their food waste and carbon footprint.
To collect qualitative data our team conducted one-on-one Zoom interviews with 9 participants and found:
- Most commonly wasted food items are hyper-perishables like leafy greens, strawberries and mushrooms;
- A variety of factors contribute to food waste including: forgetting purchased items, food getting lost in the fridge and plans changing unexpectedly;
- When asked what they’d like to see in a digital solution to combat food waste, users suggested: education on food storage and reminders to use food they’ve purchased.
A survey that received 52 responses helped us complete the picture and add some interesting insights into our research:
The pivot moment
This is where the real story of Wasteless starts. At this point, after analyzing the affinity diagram and building our user persona — Molly — we had a pretty clear vision for what we wanted our app to be. It was going to help Molly get educated on how to prolong the freshness of stored food, track what she had bought, dispose of food sustainably and overall learn more about limiting waste.
When going through the competitive analysis, the team had discovered a hidden treasure: savethefood.com, developed by the Ad Council and NRDC. This comprehensive online resource could teach people about average shelf life of different items, offered storage tips & recipes, and helped them plan meals. What we wanted was basically to create an app for this website to deliver information to users in more convenient and interactive ways.
This was also the time when we had our feedback meeting with the instructional team. The verdict: our research was solid, but our idea? Not so much. Was this going to be yet another educational app? Our instructor —Cindy — pushed us to think outside the box and look for solutions beyond the digital space to come up with something more useful. Her questions were: if all these educational resources are available, why are people not using them as much? If a lot of users in our research had a system in place for shopping consciously, where was the breaking point where life happens and plans go off track? Could we help mitigate that?
That was the big A-ha moment. It was true: we were hearing our users during research mention education on food waste, but was that really the solution — serving it up to them through an app? After all, with so many education resources already out there, the food waste problem still isn’t significantly improving.
How could we instead deliver a more successful outcome without the time commitment and dramatic behavior change required of users when absorbing and trying to apply new information?
What if we leveraged existing knowledge about reducing food waste that few people read, to power a mobile app that makes it easy to monitor food usage, storage, and waste by connecting it with tech-enabled containers that can measure the freshness of stored food? And that in nutshell became Wasteless.
During our brainstorming, we ended up focusing on prep & use, monitor, and waste management solutions for the immediate features to implement. Our initial vision could still be achieved, but it was a question of reframing education by embedding it into everyday chores. As users store their food items in the containers they could get access to video or written content on how to store properly, tips on what to cook, positive nudges to take action before it’s too late, and — when life happens — solutions to dispose of food responsibly.
Moving into prototyping
Before talking about our user flow and the prototype we designed, I want to acknowledge a big missing piece: due to the scope and timeline of the project, we could not focus our effort on designing a food container prototype. As much as we wished we could have invested more time into this because it represents the core piece of the idea, the assignment required that we shifted our focus on creating a mobile prototype, and on designing and coding a landing page.
Due to time constraints, we moved quickly through the mid-fi prototype and into a hi-fi version that we tested with six users.
The most important piece of feedback we received during the tests was that users really wanted the Impact dashboard to take a more central role in order to track their results while using the Wasteless system. For some reason, we hadn’t anticipated the Impact page would be a key piece of our flow and we were completely wrong. One of the users had pointed out that he was a bit disappointed that the waste tracker was looking more like an afterthought in the original version, when the whole concept is about reducing food waste. For the final iteration we put more thought into creating the place for users to track their progress, and moved it to the main dashboard for easy access.
Next steps & Conclusion:
- Design a prototype for the food storage containers;
- Prioritize and revisit user-suggested iterations: data-driven impact stats, customize reminders, streamline container setup;
- Consider gamification and rewarding users for sustained food waste reduction;
- Work toward the goal of keeping users at under 25% wasted food items annually (well below the national average);
- Iterate landing page funnel per Google Analytics insights and continue capturing emails to build beta waitlist to show potential investors.
This project was unique because it pushed us outside the digital space to create a wholesome solution for a difficult problem. It was also a lesson in being able to adapt fast and pivot to embrace new opportunities.
Links to presentation deck & Miro board with design artifacts
