Food Tracker

Efficient food planning to reduce food waste.

Food Tracker is a User-Experience Design project I worked on with two groupmates. We have learned how to investigate and design solutions to tackle real-world problems through field studies, surveys, prototyping, and usability tests.

  • This is a 10-week team project for Design Thinking Studio that I did with two other teammates during my time at Global Innovative Exchange. We demonstrated the tools of Design Thinking that we have learned by tackling a real-world problem.

  • We all three shared roles and responsibilities in working on our project. I lean more toward working on user research, designing surveys, investigation, and user interface design.

  • Throughout the ten weeks, we keep refining our topic based on our research and usability test to be accurate on the problem that exists today and the best way to help users to solve it.

    From: How can we help off-campus students to make grocery plans more efficient to prevent food waste and thus reduce carbon emissions?

    To: How to increase students’ knowledge in food preservation to minimize the carbon emission in food waste?

Part 1 - Secondary Research

1st Topic: How can we help off-campus students to make grocery plans more efficient to prevent food waste and thus reduce carbon emissions?

After our primary research, we have found out that food waste contributes 6% of the whole world's carbon emissions. Studies have also shown that college students lacked personal responsibility in controlling food waste and did not have a system to make meal prepping and grocery planning.

Moreover, we, as international students that just moved out from our homes, have little knowledge of food planning. I often throw away food due to the lack of planning and knowledge of food preservation. This is a problem that we all resonate with; hence, we have decided to work on a solution to it.

We have conducted secondary research through the following:

Secondary research gives me a general and broad concept of the current problems we are facing. It helps to lay the core foundation for your research of the issue. It is a good first step to seek problems to work on and have a brief understanding of the stakeholders of the problem. We want to work on issues that we resonate with and solutions for the problems the people around us face daily. Secondary research helped us identify them. I learned to plan out my primary research based on my secondary research in order to have a clearer perspective.

Part 2 - Field Studies

I have conducted a field study by observing a student’s cooking cycle, from food preparation to disposal, to identify the main reason for food waste.

Field studies have shown that students:

  • Lacked knowledge of food preservation

  • Cluttered food into the refrigerator

  • Lack of planning of the portion of their meal

Food preparation process

Food storage

After doing our secondary research, we wish to find out which part of the students’ cooking cycle wasted food the most. Field research helped us study the problems in our previous research in a real-case scenario and decide on a procedure to focus on. After getting a grip on the issue, I have made some assumptions on this issue, as mentioned above, and to further prove it using quantitative data.

Part 3 - Surveys

We want to verify the assumptions extracted from our field studies through surveys. Our questionnaire contains eleven questions, mainly focusing on users' cooking habits, including the frequency of cooking/purchasing groceries, the proportion and reasons for discarding food, the preference for purchasing food, the habits, and perceptions of food preservation.

Our survey showed that:

  • Struggle to tell if the food has turned bad

  • The fridge is way too full, and easy to forget what food has been bought

  • Do not know how to cook the remaining food

With the help of field studies and secondary research, we have narrowed down our topic and would love to use quantitative data to prove our findings or to seek out things we might have missed. Constructing a scientific survey is harder than I expected. I always had to remind myself and my groupmate that we were verifying our assumptions, not leading our interviewees to answer what we wanted to hear (our assumptions). Some of the interviewees also suggested that some of the options did not match their thoughts which made them hard to answer correctly.

Looking back, I would have put a scale into all of my survey questions instead of providing options for them to choose from. It would have provided clearer answers that suits better with the interviewees’ intent.

Luckily, other scaling questions in my survey still provided enough insights for us to work on identifying the problem that we wish to solve and the cause behind it.

Part 4 - Ideation

Topic: How to increase students’ knowledge in food preservation to minimize the carbon emission in food waste?

Combining our findings from primary and secondary research, we have altered our design topic and listed five high-priority requirements that our solution intends to resolve:

  • Teach users the correct way to store different types of food

  • Help users plan out their refrigerators

  • The process for users to obtain information about food should be simple, quick, and easy to follow, and the information should be easy to read.

  • Include the number of ingredients needed for different portions of the recipes

  • Help users to identify the status of food.

We then move on to brainstorming scenarios, storyboards, and walkthroughs of how users will use our product to get a better understanding of how our solution will be and created personas to get into a deeper understanding of our targeting users.

Ideation is a completely new process that I have never conducted before despite working as a Product Manager. I have found it very useful in product building. We always tell others to think in others’ shoes, and why shouldn’t we also place this mindset into product design? Creating storyboards, walkthroughs and scenarios helped us think from our target users’ perspectives. Think about how our solution can come out and smoothen their problem from food purchasing to preparation to cooking. It is like having a draft in your mind for your prototype. We have extracted many ideas for our product feature through this process.

  • Weekly plan before and after shopping

  • After shopping

  • Before cooking

  • Brainstorming

  • Personas

Part 5 - Prototyping and Evaluation Test

We have created a prototype after our research and ideation. We then invited our cohort to use our product under the scenario that we had designed.

My groupmates and I have taken turns as facilitators and notetakers of our tests. We have asked them to imagine living with three housemates sharing a refrigerator. They need serval tasks we set up using our solution: recording their purchased food, planning their weekly meal, learning how to store the food, and finding recipes based on current food.

‘Your food’

Users can record and search for the food that they bought. It shows the quantity, expiry date, location, and storage method.

‘Calendar’

Users can plan out the meals they intend to cook in the coming week to have a clearer picture what they should buy.

‘Recipes’

Users can look at the suggested recipes based on the food they have currently.

Our usability test did not go as smoothly as I had expected. Most users were confused by our product, especially with the recipe and calendar feature. They did not manage to finish the tasks that we had designed. The usability test went out awkwardly, but I am very glad that we have conducted it as we have identified the problem with this product.

After speaking with our users, we have a few major takeaways:

  • The aim of our product matches the problem that they are facing, but the user interface makes the feature unclear.

  • Users who cook frequently do not need recipe recommendations and make weekly meal plans.

  • The process of recording food is dull.

For future development, we should focus on the following:

  • Target Users: Users are starting to develop a habit of cooking since they rely more on guidance on food preparation, preservation, and weekly meal planning.

  • User interface: Recording newly purchased food, adding clearer labels for food

  • User Experience: Recommended recipes and added them to their weekly meal plan

Confused user

Reflection

As a previous product manager, I found this project extremely useful in designing products. In the past, we made decisions based on what we believed the user's needs were. Without user testing and research, we were not very confident with the feature we designed, eventually altering the feature constantly. When I look back, I realize that we have missed a lot of details about what user really needs and how our product can smoothen or even enlighten their lives.

Design thinking has assisted me in constructing a thought process to target the right audience, tailored with solutions that suit them. Each process of Design Thinking (primary research, secondary research, prototyping, usability tests) is to help us brainstorm users’ needs and problems. The key is to be determined and keep doing the whole process. It will inspire and expand your thoughts on a specific topic and target users.

Design thinking is a circular way of thinking instead of a linear way. It is a free-flowing way to insert it in any part of your project to lead you to the right way.