College students with access to a kitchen opt to buy groceries instead of relying on expensive meal plans or eating out.

Yet, a common dilemma we face is forgetting about those groceries tucked away in the fridge or watching them go to waste before we can enjoy them.

Our team decided to tackle this problem on the sustainability track. We enjoy the freedom and convenience of preparing our own meals, but when our efforts to save money and reduce waste are thwarted, it undermines both our economic and environmental goals.
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The thought of wasted groceries not only hits our wallets but also weighs heavily on our conscience. It got us thinking: Is there a way to effectively track our groceries and perhaps develop a more comprehensive solution for the future?

PART I.
Identifying the Opportunity

To determine if other college students shared similar concerns as us, we created a list of questions to better understand their grocery shopping and food waste management habits. We narrowed it down to three broad questions that we thought would give me the most insight into the problem space, and conducted 10 minute interviews with 3 college students.

PART II.
Understanding the Problem & Our Users

After getting a glimpse of the issue at hand, we wanted to delve deeper through a survey with a larger sample size to validate our findings. Our survey aimed to capture the thoughts, behaviors, and values of individuals regarding grocery management and food waste. We collected responses from 61 college students across the country.

Looking at our interview & survey responses, we affinity mapped our insights to organize themes and pain points. In general, we discovered that users:

PART III.
Ideating: Turning Insights --→ Concepts

We then took the insights from our grouped themes/clusters and began to explore potential solutions.

Our research uncovered a gap in the market.
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Existing apps either excel at tracking groceries (high productivity), like Cooklist and NoWaste, or facilitate grocery trading (high interactivity), such as Olio and Too Good to Go. However, none seamlessly integrate both functions.

We began the design process by first envisioning the user flow. Then, we created wireframes and a final prototype, accompanied by a very brief & informal user testing in between due to the tight schedule of the design sprint.

USER FLOW
‍The user experience we planned revolves around the dashboard, centralizing updates and grocery item management, customizable trading features, and social interactions via profiles and communities. We also wanted to emphasize on gamification elements to create optimize user engagement and motivation.

WIREFRAMES
‍We wanted focus mainly on the dashboard personalization and trading preferences at this stage and wanted to get external opinions early on. We asked a few friends to navigate the layout and prototype to see if the design and navigation was intuitive.

Overall, we found that:
👍  Users liked the organization of the dashboard
👍  The navigation for trading was intuitive and well-received.

Next ,we should work on:
❗ Find a way to show more items on the dashboard at once.
❗ Scroll funtion on the dashboard wasn't as intuitive.  
❗ Is there a way to preview trade options on the dashboard?
❗ Make the gamification elements on the dashboard more engaging.

What are my biggest takeaways?

The week-long end-to-end process of researching, testing, and refining our designs has led to a project I’m proud of, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

I LEARNED THAT...
🍏  Working with a team that communicates well and genuinely cares makes things so much more fun!
🍏  Always share my designs with people earlier on to avoid making huge changes later.
🍏  Prioritize thorough research! Skipping user interviews and surveys before designing means would have meant that our ideas lacked validation from real data and user needs, no matter how promising they seem.

I want to improve on...
🍋  Our research approach. The initial interview sample was limited and biased as they consisted of my friends. Although they provided valuable insights, a larger and more diverse audience would have been preferable for a comprehensive understanding.

MOVING FORWARD, I want to...
🍎  Fully developing the features of every page and adding interaction
🍎  Testing with additional users to understand what captivates them in other apps through gamification... how do we ensure genuine user engagement in our app without it feeling tedious or obligatory?