MealUp — A way to share your leftovers
To meet up and upcycle a meal
Team: Abby Levin, Alex Duncan, Becky Han, Gloria Shi
Timeline: Fall 2021, 10 weeks
We waste a lot of food
The goal of this project is to offer a solution for college students who have recently moved off-campus and cook for themselves to be able to prepare meals with minimal food waste.
We decided to target undergraduate students residing in Ithaca and aim to tackle the pain points we identified in students’ individual processes in storing, planning, preparing, and discarding food at home. We sought to learn more about the causes and impacts of food waste at an individual scale.
Why are we wasting?
We wanted to know others’ experiences with food waste. Our target candidates were college students or young adults who have recently moved to campus and started cooking for themselves. Our user interviews aimed to discover their common practices when dealing with food, whether or not users struggled with food waste, and what they are doing well and poorly when it comes to food. Here are some key insights:
- People buy more ingredients than they can use.
- People forget what ingredients they have and can not easily see them in fridges/cupboards.
- People struggle to plan their meals in advance.
- People try to avoid having leftovers by making less food or discarding excess.
From our user research interviews we created a persona to guide our future design decisions:
How should we solve this?
Through market research on current solutions that already target our persona’s goals, we organized them into the following solution spaces:
- Smart fridges with high visibility and keep track of food
- Apps that help users reduce food waste by recording grocery items in fridge/pantry and helping them donate excess or soon to expire food
- Apps that can generate recipes from given ingredients
- Reward system for reducing food waste
- Meal subscription services
But what is missing?
These are areas that we want to target our design to:
- Technologies catered to beginning cooks or people with less time/money, such as apps that provide budgeted shopping lists
- Ease and simplicity for users that doesn’t require them to manually input items
- Ways to deal with leftovers
- Cheaper solutions for higher visibility and transparency
Each of us brainstormed 15 designs, here are some of my favorites:
After careful discussions and evaluation of existing solutions, we noticed that many of our ideas involved sharing leftovers between members of a household or community, and thought it would be good to implement that in our final design.
MealUp-Upcycling your meals while meeting up with new friends
What is it?
Our app strives to connect users that have an excess of leftovers or ingredients and need help finishing them. With our app, users can post their leftovers and find other leftovers that they are interested in and can create leftover meal parties with other users. In a meal party, participating members bring a dish to share and try the dishes brought by others. It is a great way to socialize with others, try new foods, and reduce the number of leftovers that go to waste.
Introducing MealUp
Creating MealUp
Creating a User Profile
Inputting Available Times and Filtering Leftovers
Creating a Post of Leftovers/Ingredients You Have Available
Messaging Someone to Meet Up / Joining and Finalizing Event
Improving MealUp
We each created paper prototypes of the four tasks and user-tested those. Here is mine:
We consolidated our designs and feedback and made the following design decisions:
- Eliminating GCal integration, instead of allowing users to pick and choose times that work for them
- Allow for easier navigation with a navigation bar
- Promote accessibility by adding dietary preferences, restrictions, and allergens
Our updated task flows
Further Testing
We tested our Figma prototypes with users from our target user groups and discovered a few points of improvement on our design. Common feedback from our users was that they would be more comfortable if they knew a friend is going to or hosting a leftover party, and are more likely to use the app and attend parties in that case. There were also a few other minor confusions about the features that we clarified:
1. During the initial sign-up process, allow users to connect their other social media (integrating social media friends and allowing users to filter for friends only) and add a safety tips page for meeting up with people through the app.
2. Users choose which of the parties they posted they want to integrate with
3. Ability to search for a specific user on the home page
Final Flow
For me…
This project is different from my previous ones where I was building a feature for an existing app or working with partners/clients to solve a problem they have. This one is a problem we all felt passionately about and because of that, we were even more invested in researching and creating a solution for it. I greatly enjoyed the user research portion of the project and learning about different people’s tendencies and relationship with food waste then going to brainstorming a solution that would meet their needs even if that’s targeting a part of their problem that they hadn’t realized had a viable solution. It was interesting to reflect upon where we began and how we arrived at where we are now, and how it’s very much guided by user research and testing.
For the project…
Though the user research and brainstorming process was extensive, I wish we had more time to iterate on our Hi-fidelity designs and to think through our Information Architecture more. There are several screens that we chose to not design and prototype because it wasn’t relevant to the tasks we defined. If we had more time, it’d be good to develop those screens so that other tasks we had talked about are also present in our prototype.
