Totally Wasted: How you can save $1500 or more a year in a few steps.. A UX case study.
FoodFightr: Grocery Management Mobile App
Overview
Many of us have heard about the current food waste crisis, but how many of us have ever considered the real effect that it has on us as individuals and not as a national or global crisis? Food waste continues to be one of the most preventable causes of money loss for many Americans, and we can only speculate as to why.
Here, unlike many countries, food is not treated like most resource utilities such as electricity, natural gas, and gasoline. It is most often taken for granted in this country, why? Could it be context? If you tell anyone that they can save $1500 or more in their utilities or gas for their vehicles, they are more willing to sign-up or wait in line for those savings rather than saving food from waste. Are consumers aware of the impact of wasted food or the benefit to them by reducing that waste? We will seek to answer some of these questions and provide a possible solution to save money and reduce food waste by using the UX process.
The Problem: Opening a Can of Worms
There are many industries involved in this crisis, it starts with Growers/Farmers, Food Processors, Supermarket Industry, Lobbyist, and the Federal Government to name a few.
Food waste seems to feed a cycle that may fuel profits for many of the aforementioned industries. These profits usually do not make it back into the pockets of consumers, and smaller profits for some of these industries has translated into smaller packaging with the same pricing. So who advocates on behalf of the consumer? One group that stands out is the NRDC (National Resource Defense Council) an organization that was founded in part to make America’s water & food systems more efficient and less wasteful. Part of their message is to raise to awareness about our dwindling resources and effects of this waste on our environment. (source: NRDC)
According to the NRDC, 40% of the food produced in this country is never eaten. That translates into roughly 133 billion pounds of food totaling $161 billion in 2010 alone (source: USDA). While 1 in 8 Americans struggles to put food on the table. Many of these Americans cannot afford to lose that much money per year.
The Process:
The goal here is to define the consumers' problem and come up with possible solutions to help them. In this process, we will use different methods to uncover the consumers' real issues (pain points), and the best ways to address them. We start by asking ourselves a few questions:
- How can we save the customer money?
- How can we reduce consumer food waste?
- How might we optimize the customers' grocery experience? (utilizing all of their food, teach, be a resource)
And a few hypothesis statements:
- Reducing consumer waste can be achieved by actively tracking habits, and sending notifications to help make them aware.
- Users can save money if their groceries were better organized, digitally accessible and the consumer can set goals for food budget and waste.
- Being a resource to help make better choices with helpful tips and recall information, can further reduce waste and save money for consumers.
Quantitative Survey
I did have a bit of difficulty here because these questions are essentially the bedrock on which much of the data rest on, and I have to ask relevant questions. This may seem easy to some, but for practice makes perfect. The first survey was done online and answered by 121 respondents. These were some sample questions:
- How familiar are you with the impact of food waste in this country?
- Do you currently find it difficult to manage a food budget with the increasing cost of food?
- How often would you say you throw out expired goods or produce?
- What would you say contributes to forgetting or not consuming food products before the expiration date?
- How interested are you in saving money by reducing your food waste?
These were the results of testing:
Top 3 most thrown out items:
- 51.2% Produce
- 38% Dairy
- 30.6% Meat
88.4% of Consumers tested have thrown out food items between 1–3 times a month, but surprisingly 48.3% of them were interested in helpful food disposal practices.
Qualitative Surveys
In the second survey, I interviewed 5 consumers. I used 5 because I wanted to quickly validate or invalidate any hypothesis statement made earlier.
60% was unaware of the food crisis in this country.
40% end up throwing away up to 30% of their food budget away on spoiled or expired foods.
60% have forgotten about food items they purchased.
60% of consumers make decisions based on dates printed on the food they purchased.
These are the pain points:
- Hates wasting food
- Wants to stop wasting money on throwing out food
- Wants more information on food, product labeling, and kitchen inventory
What are the hopeful gains?
- Save Money and waste less food
- Less stress and anxiety when shopping
- Properly informed consumer
Confident Chrissie is the persona that was made based on the data, she represents the target user from the data that is available. She is an on-the-go 32-year-old Freelance Creative Consultant, from Los Angeles. Because of this, she is unable to keep a regular schedule, waste much of the groceries that she has bought, and eats out most of the time.
User Journey Takeaways:
Chrissy has a busy lifestyle and mentioned she wishes that she had a reminder to check the food items in her refrigerator.
Chrissy is disappointed because she hates wasting food, it makes her feel like she’s throwing money away.
Chrissy would like to be more organized and informed of grocery inventory would help her make better decisions.
Chrissy gets frustrated with spending so much on take-out food.
Chrissy needs to know how much food and money she is wasting, to help her plan and budget.
Chrissy currently doesn’t use any tools to help her manage any of these issues.
Deciding on these features, and which one would go into which MOSCOW category depended on what I needed to make a minimum viable product or MVP. I went back to the hypothesis statements and used it to help me categorize the features. Due to time constraints, I did not use card sorting for this project.
Ideation:
Based on users habits and the features in the Must have and Should have categories, I was left to ideate on which solution would best serve their needs. Convenience, Notifications, and Grocery inventory on demand would require a mobile solution. Concept ideas started with the smart fridges currently on the market. Most of these appliances are out of reach of many, but the fridge is only one part of the kitchen. So the question to myself is. Can we make the kitchen smarter? Can I make a smart kitchen available to all?
I started by developing a user flow chart for the main features of the mobile app. I wanted to ensure that I had a layout of the journey that the user would take while using the app. For me, it wasn’t the most glamorous part, but not doing the user flow on another app cost me a lot of time and headache. This step brought me a lot of clarity and organization.
Concepts
With the features set for the barebones app, I wanted to know how to incorporate a kitchen feel. There where times where I felt I take things a little bit literal. I opted for the refrigerator for the recognition of it’s role in the kitchen.
Low-Fi Concept:
I put these drawings into Marvel app to test it. The overall testing of the product was positive. I had prepared 2 versions an old school 50’s style top and bottom Fridge/Freezer and stainless steel split side by side style. I wanted to test the different concepts to see which one worked best. In usability testing of 15 users, 100% were in favor of the stainless steel design, 60% of users prefer to see the nav bar on top, and 80% of users enjoyed the function of the App.
Mid-Fidelity Concept:
Mid-Fidelity Takeaways:
During testing of 12 users, 80% had trouble either seeing or reaching the nav bar. 100% of users complained about the swipe feature to open the fridge and freezer. It either didn’t work, or it opened other feature on their phone which quickly got annoying.
Prototype:
UI development:
I wanted to convey the idea feel and look for the product. Pictures of the freshness of the food was important. That’s what is being promoted. I also wanted to convey how simple it was to use, and how innovative the product is.
Hi-Fidelity Prototype:
High-Fidelity takeaways and changes:
There where a few changes made on this version based the mid-fidelity usability testing results. The top nav bar was moved back to the bottom, this made room for the logo on top, and put features within thumbs range. This was done for 2 reasons. 1. Made the main features more accessible 2. Easier one handed use as many users may either be shopping or another doing activity with the other hand.
Discoveries and Pivots
By the Hi-Fidelity prototype, some consumers where still confused about how to use the app and what was it for(what does this thing do? and why should I care?). I changed the slide feature to open fridge to tap only. Many did not think that the UI lined up with the material design principles. So I made some small aesthetic changes to be closer in line with design principles.
Final Outcome
Consumers where overall happy with their experience with the app and what it does. Most felt that the app functions were simple and straightforward . The functions of the app addressed many concerns without being overly cluttered. The app did what it set out to do, it addressed many of the consumers pain points.
Conclusion & Learning (Next Steps)
Until I did this research, I never knew what “Kitchen Sink” recipes where, and I only ever considered food waste as global issue. In the past, I felt guilty about having thrown away large amounts of food, but never considered local impact or more important the impact to my wallet.
While many were excited about the app, the majority didn’t seem as though they would use an app like that. I have found that designing for consumers can be difficult even with the data. You have to sell more than an idea, the consumer must want the product. In this instance, consumers would have to want to use the product and gain the benefits, one of which is saving money.
So in the next steps, I would introduce a supermarket API so that consumers can comparison shop other grocery stores for the same product, alerts for their favorite items on sale, and improved accessibility features.
See the prototype on Invision https://invis.io/H7NH0OW3WQ6
Please give it a clap and leave feedback If this was helpful, or insightful
You can see more on robrichdesignux.com
