In the lifestyle IoT space, our challenge is to understand and address the user's struggle with forgotten, expired food purchases, leading to waste.
The United States waste the most
U.S.A discards more food than any other country in the world: nearly 60 million tons
What generation is wasting the most?
Gen Z wastes the most, with 70% reporting they throw away food at least once a week.
Solution
a remote fridge management solution, featuring seamless food scanning and manual entry.
PlatePal was developed to empower young adults to reduce food waste by offering a user-friendly solution for remote fridge inventory management, including food scanning and manual entry, while also suggesting recipes based on their stocked ingredients.
How does this help?
PlatePal was developed to empower young adults to reduce food waste by offering a user-friendly solution for remote fridge inventory management, including food scanning and manual entry, while also suggesting recipes based on their stocked ingredients.
Why have recipes?
In user interviews, multiple participants shared frustration over wasted ingredients due to uncertainty about their usage. This led to the introduction of a new recipe feature, allowing users to explore recipes with existing ingredients or minimal additional items.
Scanning ingredients into your fridge
Allows users to quickly add foods into their virtual fridge
Helps the user save money
Tracks expiration dates
Strategic phase 1 of 4
Empathizing
I initiated my research by collecting qualitative data to pinpoint the primary challenges contributing to food waste.
User Interviews
User Interview Objectives
Identify why and how food waste happens in young adult’s homes.
User Requirements
Must do their own grocery shopping
Has thrown out unused groceries at least once
Participants
5 people (20-40 years old)
Interview Location
Conducted via Zoom
Key Insights
🙈
4/5 interviewees mentioned that some food waste can be attributed to food being out of sight.
🤏
5/5 interviewees mentioned that they tend to buy less bulk to reduce waste.
🍳
4/5 interviewees create a meal plan to plan out meals for a couple of days.
📝
All five interviewee’sutilize the notes app to make their shopping lists.
User Survey
Following user interviews, a survey was deployed to quantitatively validate insights and gauge the prevalence of specific behaviors, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of food waste dynamics.
Participants
11 people
Age Group
20-40 years old
Survey Objectives
Figure out how often participants go grocery shopping
Finding out what types of food are commonly thrown out
Finding out what the leading causes to throwing food out are
When you’re grocery shopping, how far out are you shopping for?
11 responses
What types of food do you commonly waste?
11 responses
Empathy Mapping
Combining qualitative and quantitative research, I identified recurring patterns to establish key attributes defining my target user.
Strategic phase 2 of 4
Defining
Establishing Who We Are Designing For: User Persona
Having gathered both qualitative and quantitative data on the issue, I crafted a user persona to inform design decisions and enhance the user experience effectively.
The Problem Statement
Derived from the persona's objectives and pain points, I crafted a precise problem statement, ensuring a targeted solution to address the identified challenges.
⌚️
POV
Young adults' waste food because of a lack of time, forgetfulness and overbuying which makes them feel guilty.
🧾️
HMW
How might we develop a convenient way for young adults to buy only what they need and remember to use their groceries?
Strategic phase 3 of 4
Ideating
Narrowed Solutions
Creating an on-the-go app centered around visualizing fridge contents, honing in on waste reduction. Streamlining the logging of current food items while offering fresh recipes based on available ingredients.
Feature Matrix
Mapping out what features would have the greatest impact on this MVP made the prioritization process simpler for me.
Establishing The Information Architecture
Referring to my feature matrix I chose all the features that would make this Minimal Viable Product useful and delightful.
Mapping out task flows
Having set up the information architecture, I delineated task flows for the primary features of the MVP, these flows would later be used in user testing to ensure optimal user satisfaction.
Input, actions or outputs
Start/End
Decision Point/Conditional
Steps/Pages
Scanning food into "my fridge"
Adding a recipe into your meal planner
Adding a recipe into a shopping list
Crafting A Story
After understanding what was to be created, I developed a storyboard to visually articulate the usage scenarios and application of the product.
Strategic phase 4 of 4
Prototype & Test
Low Fidelity → Mid Fidelity → High Fidelity
Recipes to Try Screens
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Meal Planner Screens
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My Fridge Screens
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Recipe Card Screens
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Food Scan Screens
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Usability Testings
Testing Participants
Young adults in the 20-40 range
Young adults who do their own grocery shopping
Young adults who live on their own
Five participants were interviewed
Key Insights
👇
3/5 users thought it was weird that there was a button to start the scan action.
⏲️
3/5 users mentioned wanting to quickly see how long a recipe would take them to make.
🍳
4/5 users were delighted with the meal planner function.
Analyzing and Prioritizing Test Results
✅
Worked
💡
Ideas
🤔
Questions
🔄
Questions
Iterating based on feedback
Iterating for those in a hurry
Based on user feedback, where many expressed the need for quick decision-making, an additional feature was incorporated—a time token, enabling users to easily assess the duration of recipes at a glance and make swift choices, especially when in a hurry.
Branding & UI Components
Final Takeaways
Major Learnings
Users were wasting significant amounts of food, primarily due to forgetfulness and overbuying groceries, leading to spoilage of produce and leftovers. To address this, I created a solution that offers users a visual representation of their fridge, providing timely alerts when food is close to spoiling. Tested users found the concept useful and delightful, resulting a more resourceful and less wasteful user. This app could help users save up to $1500 a year on food, and could reduce the users carbon foot print.
What would I have done differently?
In hindsight I would have liked to better schedule my user research so that they would have only taken one day to complete instead of two days.
I would have also liked to conduct more UI pattern research so I could have spent less time iterating on UI components.
