Meet And Eat
Reduce Food Waste With A Click
Meet and Eat
Meet and Eat is a social app, which helps people in their community to connect and share food with others, in order to reduce food waste.
MY ROLE
User Research, UX and UI Design and Content Strategy.
During this project I collaborated together with three UX Designers.
Together we worked on:
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Brainstorming
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Guerilla interviews/Generative Research
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Competitive analysis
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Content Strategy
I individually worked on:
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Personas
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Storyboarding
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Paper prototyping
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Low-fidelity and high-fidelity wireframes and prototype
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User testing/Evaluative Research
Process
1. Define
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Problem Statement
2. Research
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Competitive analyses
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Generative User Research (Guerilla Interviews)
3. Analysis
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User Personas
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Storyboard
4. Design
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User Flows
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Sketches
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Low and High-fidelty wireframes
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Clickthrough prototypes
5. Test
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User Testing
6. Refine
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Style guide
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Hi-fidelity mockups
PROBLEM STATEMENT
How might we reduce waste by transforming our relationship with food?
According to The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally, which amounts to about 1.3 billion tonnes per year.
In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply.
Food loss occurs for many reasons, with some types of loss—such as spoilage—occurring at every stage of the production and supply chain. Consumers contribute to food loss when they buy or cook more than they need and choose to throw out the extras.
UNDERSTANDING THE USER
We conducted Generative Research to understand where potential users stand with food waste problem.
We found out that most potential users have daily food waste and are eager to meet with a member of their community to share a meal, in order to reduce food waste.
Generative Research discovered that the majority of the interviewed users :
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Have daily food waste and are bothered by that
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Want to help their community
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Would meet with a member in their community to share food with
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Wants to give away food for free or receive free food, in order to reduce food waste
Sometimes I forget how much we can do on individual level to help with food waste! I would love to meet with people and share food with, or just give away food to less fortunate people..
Eric, IT Manager
WIREFRAMES
I created low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes for the following user flows:
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Browse and meet people around you to share meals with, in order to reduce food waste. (Serving the needs of our primary persona)
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Make a post to share or receive food from people around you, in order to reduce food waste.
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Supportive user flows, such as adding photos to profile and set preferences.
My main goal of creating the wireframes was to test them with potential users and understand if main user flows are easily achievable from the target audience.
PERSONAS
Based on the Guerilla interviews we set up two personas. The primary persona is representing the affluent users, while the secondary is representing the low-income users we interviewed.
They have the same goal in common, but provoked by different reasons:
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The Primary persona is concerned about food waste and want to share food with people in order to help eliminate food waste.
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The Secondary persona wants to share meals with others, in order to eliminate food waste, but also save money by sharing meals.
Frustrations they are experiencing:
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Both Primary and Secondary personas' friends live far away and can rarely meet them to share meals with.
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The primary persona feels guilty when throwing food away, while the Secondary persona can't afford to throw food away.
TITLE OF THE CALLOUT BLOCK
USER TESTING
I did two rounds of user testing and iterations. First user testing was with the low-fidelity prototype and second was with iterated high-fidelity prototype, based on the user's feedback from round one.
For both rounds of testing, I tested in person with 4 different potential users I know, who are interested in reducing food waste.
I tested the 2 main user flows:
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Browse and meet people around you to share food with: Imagine that you want to find someone who has the same goal as you, sharing food, in order to reduce food waste. How would you navigate the app to find at least one person who you can share meals with and arrange a meeting?
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Share or Receive Food for Free: You have food that you want to share for free. What steps would you take using this app to share your food for free? How would you navigate the app to make a post to share your food?
FINDINGS AND THEMES
Confusing Icons.
Participants had trouble linking the app icons to their main functions they represent in the app.
Annoying Pop-up windows.
Users weren't sure why there were too many pop-up window, reminding them to take action. They were annoyed with them.
Colors and Fonts
Most of the participants didn't like the shade of green, labeling it as "outdated".
For some participants wasn't easy to read the different italic typeface in the Match pop-up window.
Browse and meet people around you to share food with
After the using testing and the finding, the wireframes were updated and refined, based on the potential users' feedback.
Based on the usability testing I:
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Updated the icons visually to better represent their functionality.
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Removed the pop-up window, which appears when users are about to send a message to a new user
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Replaced the Italic typeface with regular to promote accessibility
The main user flow: Browse and meet people around you to share meals with, in order to reduce food waste., was refined to meet better the users' goals.
It will allow users to easily find others around them, who are passionate about food waste too and make a difference together.
The user browse to users' profiles where he can sees preferences and pictures of the other users. Only if the two users want to connect with each other, they will have the ability to match and chat.
Share or Receive Food for Free
After the using testing and the finding, the wireframes were updated and refined, based on the potential users' feedback.
The second user flow: "Make a post to share or receive food from people around you, in order to reduce food waste", was refined to meet better the users' goals.
It allows users to browse through Food Feed, where they can find make a post to share free food, or receive free food.
Users can choose whether they want to share post only to their matches or people in their community too.
FINAL PROTOTYPE DESIGN
For the final design of "Meet and Eat" app, based on the usability testings, I followed simple visual style and kept the user interactions minimal and intuitive.
The design will help the future potential users to fulfill their main user flows, namely finding users around them to share meals with, in order to reduce food waste and being able to easily and quickly share free food with other users around them.
