PocketFridge
Summary
Role: Sole Contributor
Deliverables (Initial): Research Synthesis, Low Fidelity Prototyping, Testing Results
Deliverables (Revisit): Medium + High Fidelity Prototype
I had one week to research and design a solution to food waste management among college students. I learned that students’ busy schedules and housing situations caused their groceries to spoil before they could cook them, so I designed an app that logged their food and expiration dates. Later, in August, I revisited the platform to move it into high fidelity.
Process
As part of the Spring 2019 application process for Berkeley Innovation, UC Berkeley’s human-centered design consultancy, I had one week to go through the design process to answer the following question:
How might we improve food waste management?
Research
I first started by looking up facts about food waste and current approaches to the problem. I found a lot of eye-opening figures, such as how the EPA reports that:
“In 2015 alone, more than 39 million tons of food waste was generated, with only 5.3 percent diverted from landfills and incinerators for composting.”
Further, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says that:
by eliminating food loss and wasted food we would have enough food to feed all the chronically undernourished.”
Around this time, I realized that it would be important to define the scope of this project, so I decided to design for college students that aren’t living on campus/don’t have dining plans. Being a part of that community has shown me how much food waste we actually do produce, so I thought it would be a fitting scope with plenty of interviewees nearby.
With some secondary research and the scope in mind, I began to formulate questions for interviews. Some examples included:
“For what reasons do you find yourself throwing away food?”
”Does the majority of your food waste come from groceries, food you’ve cooked, or food at restaurants/take-out?”
“Does most of the food you throw out go into compost or general waste?”
After interviewing 11 people — admittedly a little much for a project with such a short timeline — I found some interesting key numbers:
Insights
After looking at the results of the interviews, a few main insights about the practices of students in apartments jumped out:
Insight: Most students' food waste seems to come from spoiled groceries, specifically produce. This is compounded by the lack of compost capabilities.
Insight: Due to students' busy schedules and crammed housing, they often forget to cook their groceries or have trouble remembering who bought what.
Ideation
With the list of insights in mind, I began to think of possible ways to combat food waste. Some ideas, however outlandish they may have been, included:
a snapshot from rough brainstorming & diverging 👉🏼
After diverging and generating some ideas for the challenge, I evaluated each one and eventually converged on the app that would remind users when their groceries would expire. Here’s a breakdown of its features:
It scans barcodes, lets users enter items that don’t have bar codes (such as some produce), and logs expirations dates.
It sends notifications when users only have a couple days left to cook their food, with exact timing adjustable in preferences.
The insight that users often forget to cook their groceries informed this decision.
It lists out all the groceries that the user has logged.
This attempts to fix the issue of people forgetting what they have or being confused as to whose food is whose.
It displays recipes for users based on what they have logged.
Though this doesn’t come from any particular insight, I thought it may make it easier for people to use up the groceries they have in new ways.
I’m thankful that the prompt noted that our solutions did not have to fit within the current constraints of industry practice or technology. Barcodes don’t actually contain expiration date information, but under the premise of ignoring industry norms, I thought it would be one of the most convenient ways for users to log their groceries.
Prototyping
With a product in mind, I started developing some rough ideas of what it could look like.
An early + rough sketch of the navigation to the home screen 👉🏼
Given the super short timeline of the project, I focused on designing low fidelity mock-ups of the most important screens. The screens below were made using Adobe XD.
👈🏼 One of the main flows of the app
In this gif, a user is navigating to see what food they currently have, selecting an item, and seeing what recipes can be made with it.
Due to time constraints, I didn’t create high fidelity mockups. It’s on my to-do list to continue developing this idea and see what it could look like if it came to fruition.
Testing & Further Insights
After running the prototypes by a couple people, I received mostly positive feedback that the design was intuitive. In addition, I learned more ways to improve the current design:
Scanning bar codes still requires the user to do extra work; with developments in recognition technology and AI, it would be nice to be able to just take a picture of all their groceries and have them automatically recognized.
Connectivity is key — partnering with other services like InstaCart would be a seamless way to update your stock after you use it.
Including an education section with best storage practices (e.g. don’t store certain fruit with bananas) and tips for buying sustainably & meal preparing
If I were to continue developing this idea, I would want to pursue these improvements, especially the InstaCart connectivity and education section.
Reflection
This design challenge opened my eyes to ways that human-centered design and its applications can make a big impact in some of the most difficult issues that society grapples with. I never really thought of food waste as something that designers could have a part in solving — that seemed like an issue for politicians, community organizers, and corporations. This challenge made me realize that design can not only make our daily lives easier, but also help tackle large scale, systemic issue plaguing society.
Looking back on this project, I realize where I spent too much time and where I didn’t spend enough time. Conducting 11 interviews for a week-long project was a little much, and I probably should’ve stopped after I started noticing patterns. If I had stopped earlier, I would’ve been able to move on sooner and possibly make some high-fidelity prototypes as well. Similarly, knowing more now about the human-centered design process, it would’ve been helpful to create personas to guide my thoughts better throughout the challenge.
Continued, many months later . . . 🙈
I’ve always said I wanted to come back to this project and flesh it out a little bit more, and I finally have a little bit of time to do so. Right now, I’m working on moving it to mid- and high-fidelity and prototyping it a little bit more.
Here’s a flow that hits all the major points of PocketFridge:
And a more detailed look at some of the major screens with some key features/explanations:
Reflections #2
Personal projects and goals can be hard to keep up with. I wish I didn’t wait so long to start working on this again, but I’m still happy to have revisited this and see the differences in the screens from February to August!
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