Mobile Design
Designing a time efficient application that tackles food waste.
Role
UI/UX Designer to Team Lead
Duration
2 months
Tools
Figma
❓ Overall Problem Space
US households waste about ⅓ of the food purchased every year.
Especially with the rise of COVID and stay at home regulations, more people are cooking at home. As the days go on, it gets harder and harder to think of good recipes that are delicious, not repetitive or wasteful.
According to Feeding America, 108 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States yearly. That's about 130 billion meals and more than $408 billion in food thrown away each year. Nearly 40% of all food in America is wasted. That's a lot of food!
Based off the ingredients that users have in their pantry and the closest expiration dates, HomeCooked produces tailored recipes that help users find things to cook quickly, easily, and without waste.
Get Tailored Recipes
✨ Solution
With HomeCooked users can...
Easily Scan Receipts
We know it can be hard to update ingredients all the time! HomeCooked has a scanning feature where users can take a picture of their receipt and the ingredients are automatically inputted into the pantry.
🔬 Research
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What do other food waste applications do? Competitive Analysis.
To start our research phase, we looked at other food waste based applications, analyzing their features to better guide what areas they target and find areas to differentiate ourselves. Many of the most famous applications focus on delivery services that send perfect or imperfect foods for a cheaper price. But this excludes those who might not be close to specific stores that sells imperfect produce or the delivery service does not deliver to a specific area.
We want to create an application that focuses on accessibility -- everyone can use this app no matter the geographic area.
This led us to the kitchen area, a very universal area, where cooking and waste often happens in the household.
Those who cook also targets the most amount of people, attempting to make food waste reduction habits a common experience.
Understanding and validating the problem, hearing from real people. Surveying and Interviews.
Especially because food waste is not an extremely discussed topic, we wanted to both understand and validate that food waste is something that people want to think about in their lives. Given that we wanted to focus on the kitchen and cooking process, we mainly asked about that in ours surveys and interviews.
We surveyed 9 people and interviewed 3 people ages 15-51+ years old on the decisions they make when cooking and their food waste habits.
90% said that they do not think about how much food they waste in their daily lives but would like to reduce their waste if possible.
From the interviews, we learned that many young people
Don't cook because they feel like they don't have time.
So what can we do with this information?
💡 What we found...
There are multiple reasons why people don't cook, but the main cause is time and convenience. Specifically:
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Would rather spend their time on something else than cooking
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Hard to find recipes and cook something time efficient based on what they like to eat.
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Have to buy ingredients based on what they want to cook which takes a lot of time
💭 Ideation
Ideas to Concept. Ideation.
From our research, we saw that we could possibly hit two birds with one stone. Assuming that we can improve the cooking process while also including food waste reduction habits seamlessly into this process, then we could allow for food waste minimization to be a more effective integration into everyday life.
So, the overarching question becomes...
How might we improve the cooking process while simultaneously including food waste reduction habits?
Understanding who we're designing for. User Persona Creation & Customer Journey Mapping.
To help us get started ideating, we created a user persona to provide us with some direction in who we might be designing for and for us to keep in mind as we create our ideas.
In order to really design for the cooking process, we needed to understand the cooking process. So, we mapped out what a typical user's journey to cook something may look like.
💡 What we found...
There are many opportunities to improve as it seems like the cooking process is really time consuming. Some thoughts:
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How can we reduce the cognitive load for all of these steps (grocery shopping, deliberating what to eat, finding recipes)?
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Could we possibly remove the second buying groceries step or remove the hassle of finding ingredients that work for specific recipes?
Consolidating into a single idea & thoroughly ideating against our competitors. Competitive Analysis #2.
Our overall ideas were to create an application that goes hand in hand with the cooking process -- creating an easy and sustainable method for the cooking experience. We started creating features, but realized that there might be other competitors in the market who have these ideas. So, we decided to conduct another brief competitive analysis to best improve our application and differentiate from them:
We found that although these competitors had some ideas that were similar to ours, there were two areas that we wanted to focus on that they did not.
1. Efficiency on inputting ingredients.
2. Emphasis on reducing food waste.
🎨 Designing
So, we started with a quick wireframe & a user flow to better map out the idea of our design.
Refined Sketches
User Flow
Does this actually make sense? Conducting user feedback.
After creating mid-fi wireframes, I conducted a user feedback session with 3 users, asking them to test out the prototype.
The overall ideas that we wanted to see were:
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Is the flow clear?
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Was there anything that they thought might be useful to add or change?
A few of the things that my user interviews commented...
"I feel like this recipe is a lot to read."
"What if I don't know what I have and don't have?"
"Hmm.. I would want to know how much time each of these recipes take."
We synthesized and decided to change and add MANY new features to our application:
Home Before + After
Before
After
Recipe Before + After
Before
After
💡 TLDR...
What we changed:
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Instead of just a recipe list, add a supplemental instructional video to provide an auditory experience for people to follow while they're busy cooking.
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Signify whether there are some ingredients that they don't have in their pantry.
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Time, rating, and difficulty should be shown on the home page for quick scannability.
Enhancing the cooking experience while simultaneously minimizing food waste.
✨ Final Design
Onboarding for easier conversion.
A short and quick onboarding allows for easier set up of the pantry and personalized recommendations for the user's homepage.
A robust simplification of the cooking process: Ingredients, Reviews & Recipe.
To reduce the load and questions that users have to decide what to cook and eat, each recipe has a collection of information to help guide their decisions.
An easy way to save food.
After grocery shopping, people can take a picture of their receipt to easily input it into their pantry. Expiration dates of pantry foods are highlighted as the dates get closer.
💥 Impact
Although this was a personal project, this project has won XHacks, the yearly design hackathon at CMU, Best Pitch Award and 1st place at the Carnegie Mellon Business Association Product Development Competition.
🤔 Thoughts
What did I learn? Improvements & Possibilities.
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Research is super super important: Having solid background and user research can lead to a lot of interesting and innovative ideas that brings to light edge cases or areas that designers did not think of. I wish I was able to do another round of interviewing with many different types of people especially when establishing the customer journey map to learn more about the different processes and experiences of the cooking process.
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Gamefication?: As I was ideating, I saw possibilities where cooking could be gamified and/or made more engaging. There are many ways where we can incorporate decreasing food waste habits in a fun cooking application. Ex: users can explore favorited recipes of other users, amass a following, create their own recipes to share with others -- there's so many more exciting and interesting features that can spice up the application.
What More?
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Thinking more about the features and overall user flow
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Do another round of testing for changes
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Create a visual brand identity for the application
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Incorporate more food waste reduction based ideas
And Finally....
Creating small changes in individual habits lead to group success: Although food waste is a huge area to tackle, applications such as these is the first step to change.
