HopeLink App Case Study: Solving the issue of food preservation for the homeless.

Problem: Homeless people fail to preserve/store food.

From 5 interviews, a plethora of problems were discovered and by assessing their importance, the issue of food preservation was deemed to be the Most Urgent & Most Important, followed by shelter. Usually, food pantries provide food once a day and homeless people would ideally like to store the extra food somewhere to prevent food being rotten.

The Competition had NO ASPECT of FOOD STORAGE/WASTAGE

By doing a competitive benchmarking, we understood that no one app caters for all the problems a homeless person faces. And different apps that are made for them, serve them differently. This gave birth to the idea of actualizing food preservation.

Of the 5 Interview Recordings, 3 Participants mentioned their struggles with food

From the experiences of the 5 people, we learned about their food problems, housing problems, health problems and employment problems. Several Questions were asked that would reveal their every struggle which helped with theme organization using affinity mapping.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1. Tell me about your situation ?

2. How did you end up homeless ?

3. Is anybody helping you ?

4. How are you surviving ?

5. Why do you struggle navigating social services ?

6. If you had 3 wishes, what would they be ?

From the 5 user interviews and affinity mapping, we can say that their main problems can be grouped into a handful of issues, namely food problems, housing problems, health problems and employment problems.

User Story: What users expect ?

Dennis: As a person who does not have a house and refrigerator, I want to eat fresh food and store it for later so that the food does not get bad/rotten.

Solution: Locating Community Fridges is Key -

From research, the emergence of Community Fridges came into view. These are fridges that are donated by charities or individuals and are kept and maintained near or inside shops like convenience stores. Here, people who have extra food at home, can donate them for other people to take for free. This opportunity can be used by homeless people to store their food in these community fridges and also get homemade fresh food at no cost.

Key User Flow

3 Major Improvements following Testing

The Final Product

Things I Learnt & would do Differently next time.

1. Do another round of Usability Testing: The first round of usability testing proved to be very insightful as testers struggled in certain parts of the app. This created the need for improvements/redesign. A second usability test would validate the success of the improvements made.
2. Doing more iterations: A great deal of time had been spent in user research and learning about the other aspects/themes that affect the lives of homeless people. If more time had been spent on focussing on the issue with food preservation, more potential solutions could have been designed and tested.
3. Test with a higher number of Test Participants: Due to constraints in resources, only 3 participants were used for usability testing. A higher number of test participants provides better quality of data and more accurate representation of the state of homeless people. Moreover, testing with actual homeless people would also provide insight into their experience with technology and whether the accessibility measures(larger touchpoints, touchpoints outlined, high contrast, etc.) taken in the app design was successful.

Thank you for reading ! 🧠

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