Lettuce: A Mobile App
A mobile app concept that reduces waste before it begins: in the kitchen and in the fridge!
Do you find leftovers or food in the fridge or pantry and feel guilty about throwing them out? Lettuce helps reduce waste before it begins!
My Role: UX/UI design and research
Duration: 3 Weeks | Nov - Dec 2021
Team: Alex Carriles, Andy Martinez, Sarah Comella and myself
Tools Used: Figma, Invision, Miro, Trello, Google Forms and social media
OVERVIEW
THE CHALLENGE
Adults are struggling to create and commit to meal plans, which leads to food waste within their household.
THE SOLUTION
A mobile app to help people meal plan, easily create grocery lists, and stay motivated to commit to their plan.
How might we motivate people to create meal plans, and keep them committed to their plans in order to continue eliminating food waste?
THE IMPACT
Users are empowered and motivated to plan and shop appropriately, reducing the amount of food thrown away each week.
DESIGN PROCESS
RESEARCH
To gain better insight on people's eating and cooking habits we conducted 10 one-on-one interviews and surveyed nearly 50 individuals. Our finding gave us good insight of how to proceed in developing our user persona.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
People are aware that food waste is happening in their households
The biggest factor contributing to in-home food waste was poor meal planning
Less than half of our user's surveyed were interested in an app that directly deals with food waste
40-50% of food waste happens at the consumer level
USER PERSONA
Utilizing our data from our survey and interviews we developed a user persona with the user insight: Adults need more effective and engaging ways to prepare and stick to meal plans, because impromptu grocery shopping and not committing to eating what was bought, leads to food waste.
We had a few assumptions that we had to re-think and re-focus to align our persona to fit our user: we assumed the user would be early 20s and possibly in college. We also assumed that money would be a contributing factor to eliminate food waste, but that wasn't the case either. Our user is very conscious about the environmental impacts of waste, cooks at home on a regular basis and is motivated to help reduce waste.
JOURNEY MAP & STORYBOARDING
Now that we had a clear picture of who our user is and what their context, goals and pain points were, we created a current-state journey map and a story board to envision how our app could assist them to achieve their goals and eliminate their pain points and reduce food waste while planning out their meals on a weekly basis.
Further Ideation and Definition
We were really coming along with how our app could assist our user, but now had to iron out some features that would benefit and ultimately help them accomplish their goals and alleviate pain points. We began with a comprehensive competitor analysis and an I like, I wish, What if brainstorm and rolled that into our feature prioritization matrix.
Our team had a lot of confidence now with how to equip our user to meal-plan efficiently and effectively; and stay motivated to stick to their plan. Our matrix allowed us to really hone in on these three features to focus our attention: Meal planning/auto-generated grocery lists, collaboration with friends and household members, and motivation/rewards for sticking to their plans. We were now ready to start drawing it all up with wireframing and prototyping.
Wireframes and Prototype
We hand-drew low fidelity wireframes and worked out four tasks for our usability testing. We tested on a total of eleven individuals- nine of which were through remote testing and two of which were in-person, guerilla tests at a nearby coffee shop. Our testers provided valuable feedback: the overall tasks were intuitive, understandable and simple to complete; however, some of the features didn't make sense: mostly on the user flow order of meal planning and some misunderstanding of the point system.
Lo-Fi Wire Frames
Prototype
FINAL RESULTS
Usability testing on our prototype gave us a clearer picture of how we accomplished our goals as a team for our user's benefit and experience. We had three weeks to create, research, design and prototype a mobile app and we accomplished our goal. For our final testing we had suggestions of future iterations of a pantry inventory feature and enhancement of our "Garden Growing"rewards concept which did not get flushed out as much in the prototype due to time constraints. Overall our team grew to depend on each other, listen and value our strengths as a team and come up with a pretty remarkable concept within a short period. Click here to view final prototype.
Lessons Learned:
Project: Start with a problem, not a solution. Our team struggled at first as we were coming up with a lot of solutions and attempting to begin the process that way, instead of starting with a problem and letting the solutions reveal themselves through research. That was a very valuable lesson learned. Another lesson after presenting our concept: we didn't do a very good job on our accessibility for our mobile app. Future iterations will need to take AA standards in consideration and overall we will need to re-evaluate our colors, design elements and font size for accessibility
Next Steps:
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Continue to build out app with features we didn’t have time for
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Design with accessibility in mind and maybe even a rehaul of UI elements
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Continue user testing the prototype
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Build out our case studies