How We Designed a Feature for Instacart that Helps Reduce Food Waste — A UX Case Study
Project Summary
A Product Design Challenge started on July 22, calling on Product designers, UX/UI designers, researchers, and designers of any kind to help solve environmental, health, and social inequality issues through design. We took part in this challenge, amid a rising concern over food waste.
Food Waste Problem
In modern households, people often tend to buy more than they need, which results in an unintentional food waste.
Early last year, a report, entitled “The Avoidable Crisis of Food Waste,” was released. According to the research, around 2.38 million tonnes of food, or more than $10 billion worth, is lost at the consumer level in Canada. And the waste comes with environmental impacts. Each year, food waste in Canada creates some 56.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions, according to the report. Food in landfills also creates methane gas, which is “25 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide.”
As alarming as this report sounds, these outcomes can be avoidable. And with the help of digital tools, this process can be easier for both manufacturers and consumers.
Nevertheless, there has been a growing popularity with grocery shopping services like Instacart, which plays an important role in helping save lives and getting people food.
Why Instacart?
In light of the coronavirus, where many people are under month-long quarantine, and in need of getting food delivered to their doors, Instacart became an essential service with essential workers, also known as shoppers, putting their lives on the line to get people their groceries.
In the handful of weeks since the WHO announced COVID-19 a global pandemic, demand for Instacart has surged more than 500%, a level neither investors nor customers expected to see. Instacart reported its first-ever monthly profit in April of $10 million, and it’s on track to process more than $35 billion in grocery sales this year. This comes as a very surprising number associated with an upmarket delivery service. Moreover, Instacart has secured new funding to keep up with the unprecedented growth and demand in its business. Instacart has raised $225 million in a round which brings Instacart’s valuation to nearly $14 billion.
Apparently, with more and more people getting onboard with Instacart or other similar services, as well as people hoarding food and essentials, a new surge of food waste is well expected.
I am also an Instacart customer who enjoyed the benefit myself to be able to stay at home. This inspired me and my product design partner of how digital experience can be a key part of a solution to reduce food waste. By taking Instacart as the targeted platform, we can build a feature that stays right in the app, and makes the user experience even better.
Solution
We have envisioned an add-on feature for Instacart, that helps users buy no more than what they need, avoids as much food waste as possible by friendly and timely reminders, and even inspired users how to deal with soon-to-be-expired groceries.
User Research
We interviewed people about their grocery-shopping habit and experience, after which we put together our persona and user journey.
Interview
We interviewed and surveyed 7 people in total, 3 female and 4 male. All were young adults, which fit our focused demographic.
If you would like to share your inputs, you can join our online survey at: https://forms.gle/Ccy3GckRfZhuj6WR9
Our findings are as follows:
- In general, people don’t want to waste food but it happens due to various reasons.
- Half of the interviewees reported that they often found them buying more than needed.
- Everyone interviewed had wasted food. More than half had it every week.
- Everyone interviewed had experimented with different ways of storing food properly.
Here, we will break it down into different stages to analyze the reasons why food waste happens based on our research.
Persona
User Journey
There are two groups of users, shoppers who do the shopping at supermarkets, and users who make orders and wait at home. It is fairly simple to visualize the flow / journey both shoppers and users have. We used sticky notes to stage the process.
Wireframe
After having all the basics sorted out, we moved on to wire-framing and interface designing.
Sketch
Digital Wireframe
Shoppers Interface and workflow to shop and scan / edit the expiration dates.
Users’ notifications about not-to-waste tips and expiration info.
(Credit: Uber & iOS 14 Figma Community Design UI Kits)
User Test
After having the basic mock-ups, we did user tests around groups of people, to see if the core workflow makes sense to them and how we could improve on that. As such, we came up with an updated design for the list items that display item images as well as the best-before information.
Design
After getting the information we needed, we later on improved the whole UI to make it cohesive and intuitive, also, hopefully, a close match to Instacart, on which this feature we are trying to build.
For shopper:
For user/customer:
To access the design, use this link to our Figma file: Product Design Challenge Design
Reflection
This solution we came up with is fairly simple and straightforward, and most importantly, feasible. When we were researching options of reducing food waste, we realized that people want to help, yet they don’t have the tools to do it.
Since Instacart has already built this community and platform, where countless shoppers help their customers get what they need, we thought that could be a right angle to start with, giving people the tool they need, and they can do wonderful things to save our environment.
We made the design decision that asks shoppers to do what’s needed in terms of getting the expiration date, some of which can be done by existing supply chain data extracted from the bar code, and the rest will rely on manual kind work from the shoppers. Therefore our users, the end customers, will only get notifications about tips and tricks, and also reminders of things going bad in their fridges.
Greater Good
As designers, we are problem-solvers, we bring solutions to this challenging world so that we can make changes for the good cause, and the greater good. As stated in the previous sections about the background story, we are well aware that this is a complicated issue, but if we can help people buy less than they need, and remind them not to, that can be a step worth taking.
We appreciate the opportunity of this product design challenge that put the issues in front of us, and had us work around a meaningful one.
Team
We are two designers based in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Anyuan Wang, Product & UX/UI Designer
Shawn Deng, Product & Service Designer
