Empowering households to take action against food waste in their home

My partner and I took part in Enactus’ Design Innovation Challenge. We planned to target one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns.

Pathsave would be the perfect tool to accompany markets within the supermarkets & grocery stores industry in Canada as it is worth about $98.3 billion in 2021.

To kick off the project, we set up a meeting to identify a mutually agreed upon problem - food waste, where an improved experience matters. We decided to target the household specifically because we believed that there was a disconnect between the way people perceive their food storage, usage, and waste and found an opportunity to use technology to connect people with existing services to change this.

This led us to our investigation phase where the success of this project relied on our ability to empathize with users and learn as much as possible about food waste within households. I started my research with a few key goals in mind:

We selected 10 participants from our survey to gain rich qualitative research through in-person interviews. We also conducted 4 contextual inquiries with potential users within their homes to understand their current food organization habits and food waste disposal routines. Due to COVID-19 and scarce in-person interaction with strangers, we lacked access to interviewing them within grocery stores.

The key findings from our interviews and surveys established a strong foundation for us to better understand the user’s current practices, needs, and emotions behind their food waste habits within the household.

After having a rich understanding of the user’s frustrations we created a user persona and empathy map to represent our main intended audience for the experience we were designing. The persona was developed by a combination of characteristics, needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals we understood from the initial research. This allowed us to ensure we understood our ideal user and helped guide us in our ideation process by brainstorming through our target user’s perspective.

Identifying themes and brainstorming

To get all our ideas out on the table, we used the information from our user surveys and interviews, to create an affinity map. We clustered similarities from the information we discovered and identified some of the user’s key pain points, insights, which led to possible solutions.

Creating a user journey map allowed me to empathize with potential users on a macro level while keeping our persona in mind. I was able to identify their feelings during each stage and develop potential solutions to satisfy their needs and outline potential gaps of opportunities.

Understanding how the user interacts with the product

I created a user flow diagram to represent and understand the experience our ideal user would have while interacting with the app. We decided to create a mobile application to address this problem because it would be the easiest to serve the user. The user could access the app wherever they are, whether they are at home, the kitchen, grocery store, or even work.

I found that planning out the user flow early on helped me make more strategic design decisions as I could identify opportunity areas and ask users to perform a specific task during future user testing sessions.

With potential design solutions in mind, I dived into translating them into some medium-fidelity wireframes. I turned them into wire flows to grasp a better understanding of the interactions the user will have with the actionable targets on each screen.

Making improvements by testing usability problems

Time to test our designs with users. I used my mid-fidelity mockups to create a prototype to conduct moderated user tests. I believe a usability test isn't a validation test but rather, it's a test to find problems with your designs. By observing how users behaved we were able to create a much more functional experience for the intended audience.