Save the Food
Save the Food
I worked as the Lead UX Designer on a pro-bono campaign with the NRDC and AdCounil in an effort to bring awareness to and eliminate food waste in America.
The ask began with a simple site that could serve as an educational platform to teach visitors about food waste in America. It quickly evolved into a series of interactive tools offering a range of functionalities to help our audience proactively plan their meals to avoid overbuying, to a tool that provides guidance around storage and how to use scraps.
Meal Prep Mate
The Ask
The Guestimator was very successful during the holiday season and resulted with a lot of happy users who were spreading their satisfaction organically through social channels.
We realized that while the Guestimator was a great tool for larger parties, we were not addressing how to eliminate food waste on a day to day basis. We decided in order for Save the Food to have a larger impact on food waste, we needed to create a tool that people could use in their weekly lives.
Discovery:
To start, we looked at other meal prep tools that currently existed in the marketplace. Food portioning and nutritional apps were top of mind as we started to research different features and functionalities of each app.
We then began to interview different users to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how they plan, shop, and store their food items.
From this initial research we were able to come out with some key take-aways that helped our team to hone in on how each of our users shop, their feature prioritization, and value proposition that would help differentiate this tool in the marketplace.
Discovery Synthesis:
Sketches and Ideation:
After we had a grasp on the feature prioritization and the different ways that our users shop, we started to sketch out some ideas on how the tool look look while meeting the core functional requirements. Our goal with the tool was to make the barrier of entry low enough in keeping the tool flexible, but also robust enough to still be an asset to semi-experienced meal planners who are still looking to learn.
Avoiding repetition
One of the key points we discovered during our initial user research was that people who meal plan frequently experience what is known as ‘flavor fatigue’. This is when someone eats the same exact meal multiple days in a row and ends up burning out at the entire concept of meal planning all together. In order to avoid this we included the ‘Remix Meals’ portion into each meal plan. This provided 3 suggestions for alternative meal ideas based on the selections that the user had initially made when choosing their ingredient
Categorizing ingredients
We decided to keep fruits and vegetables in the same produce section and allow the users to navigate between the two using tabs. From our research we discovered that while they can be used for separate meals, they are mentally grouped into the same category when it comes to shopping and locating ingredients in the store.
Tying it all together
Other key take-aways from our research showed us that this tool had to incorporate other aspects from the Save the Food tools we had built in the past. We decided to include the “Storage” tool that had been informed from our initial research and production of the Alexa app to ensure that users were well equipped with all the information they needed to minimize food waste, without having to constantly revisit the site - making the tool more convenient and memorable.
