Frima - Food Wastage Management Application.

Goal - To help users avoid food wastage.

Accomplishing long-term goals for individuals who struggle with inventory management for their groceries through a better implementation of user-focused recipe suggestions, automated expiration date notifications, and automated receipt scans.

Understanding the Challenge - 

An estimated 31 percent of the U.S. food supply is lost to retail and consumer side food waste, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The challenge here is to help users manage their groceries and avoid throwing away food.

Concept

UI/UX

Role

User Research,
Visual Design, UI/UX

Duration

6 Weeks (Fall 2020)

Team

Pranav Shinde
Shubhankar Singh
Harsh Jain

Problem - 

Redundancy in the same recipes being cooked every day makes the user want to eat outside.

Solution -

Understanding the eating habits of the user to suggest new recipes based on the available inventory to avoid redundancy.

Eating Habits

Understanding the user's preferences in terms of eating habits & the time they like to spend on cooking.

Suggested Recipes

Helping users to navigate through new recipe suggestions for every meal of the day based on the expiration dates and their eating preferences.

Problem -

Keeping in mind the expiry dates of each & every item is a difficult task.

Solution -

Notify users of expiry dates as they are approaching & prompting new recipes according to the same.

Expiration Dates

Each and every item is labeled with an expiry date which helps the user keep track without worrying.

Expiration dates based recipes

Prioritizing recipes based on items that expire at the earliest to help reduce waste.

Research

The thoughts and user inputs that resulted in the above-presented solution.

Interviews & Affinity Mapping

The interview process started with developing a questionnaire based on the observed problems, understanding of the solution would be taken into consideration by the audience. A total of 16 interviews were conducted along with a demographic which included people from the ages of 22 - 48, with a wide range of serving occupations to students.

265 cards were derived from the interview process to be considered for Affinity Mapping. The grouping was done in a step by step process which leads us to 3 levels of grouping through which we could derive our conclusions.

Key Interview Takeaways

Expiry Date Reminders
The users have a difficult time remembering the expiry dates as there are multiple perishables in the refrigerator always.

Getting bored of the same food
Most of the people who are single tend to express disappointment about having to eat at home every day because of the repeating recipes which lead to them throwing away items from their inventory.

Inventory Input
It is a tedious task to manually input every grocery item every time for an app to determine the grocery supplies.

Developing the Desired Solution

From the interviews, we envisioned that the users would need help in remembering expiry dates of products, a seamless inventory input, and recipe suggestions based upon their ideal course meal which would help them alleviate the problems that they majorly outlined to create a seamless experience.

Organize the Inventory
Create a view for the users to be able to track the expiry dates of various food items that are likely to get perished easily.

Suggested Recipes
Help users maximize the usage of their inventory and reduce the redundancy of the same old recipes by tracking and suggesting new recipes with the available inventory.

Automatic Receipt Input
Provide the users with the same logic of scanning grocery receipts to maintain a fresh list of groceries purchased rather than manually entering them.

Life Score
Providing users with information relating to their performance levels, such as the number of positive reviews you have gained from their peers or other users, can give them the incentive to persevere with a task or a range of tasks

Understanding the Target Users

Students

Want to try out new recipes rather than eating outside which would help them manage their inventory and expenses.

Single Living Individuals

With an everlasting issue of managing their inventory, they would like to remember expiry dates as well as try out new recipes.

Working Individuals

On top of a hectic schedule, managing their eating habits and expiry dates is a hectic task to undertake.

User Journey(s)

I put myself in the shoes of each of the above individuals to understand the exact pain points. Post that I intended to base my solution by merging all 3 solutions into an all-around application that would satisfy the needs of the specifically targeted users.

Students

• Recipe Suggestions
• Customization
• Expiry Date based recipes

Students

• Recipe Suggestions
• Customization
• Expiry Date based recipes

Single Living Individuals

• Expiration Date Reminders
• Restock whenever utilized

Single Living Individuals

• Expiration Dates
• Items when expired moved to restock

Working Individuals

• Scan Barcode
• Option to enter items manually

Working Individuals

• Restock list auto-populated
• Scan Receipt/Barcode
• Enter Items manually if skipped

Wireframing

Wireframing was an important step in the process which helped us to visualize the solution as a rough sketch. The most important thing which it led me to was the UX writing for the scenario which was much easier to translate for the real experience the app would provide.

Visual Design

Visual Inspiration

UI Color Palette

Orange is associated with meanings of enthusiasm, success, encouragement, change, determination. Additionally, we used black for the text and included a great deal of white & grey to give a calm and clean appearance along with good contrast for the visual elements.

Typography

IBM Plex Sans

Light

Text

Bold

IBM Plex Sans is a neutral, yet friendly Grotesque style typeface that includes a Sans, Sans Condensed, Mono, and Serif and has excellent legibility in print, web, and mobile interfaces. Plex’s three designs work well independently, and even better together. The unexpectedly expressive nature of the italics gave us even more options for our designs.

Design Components

Use Cards to represent recipes, inventory items and also to group similar items together.

Recipe Suggestions

Recipe

Multiple Suggestions Grouping

Other Components

Buttons

Actions

Icons

Final Designs

Understanding the Life Score (In-App Gamification Feature)

Why?

People often like to see how they are performing in a particular domain. This can greatly improve the user experience and encourage users to continue using the application, invest more time carrying out tasks. Indeed, being told how they’re doing can spur them on to involve themselves at a deeper level.

How?

Life Score provides an opportunity for the user to be incentivized through managing his waste based on the support the application provides. The amount of wastage that the user is forced to throw alongside how many of the groceries have been fully utilized is used to determine the score. The score helps the user incentivize in terms of grocery coupons or any other relatable reward. This helps the user in being more focused on the task at hand which is reducing waste. The incentivization helps the user to have another goal in mind which would enable him to deeply invest himself in the process which the application outlines for him.

Design

Life Score

An explanation of how the Life Score would be calculated for the users is shown so as to keep the user informed about the same.

What helps it?

Allowing the user to track how much wastage has the application recorded, how much consumption was done helps in keeping the score up higher!

Affect on Life Score

Each and every meal suggestion also notifies the user how much the Life Score would be impacted.

How would I test the solution?

Number of Recipes Used - 
I would like to track how many users are actually using recipes that the application suggests so as to maintain a data point entry for how much the users are taking action.

Positive/Negative Life Score - 
Tracking the Life Score of the user testing group would enable me to understand how the feature is being utilized by the audience. It would help me in understanding if incentivizing a goal is enabling the user to stay more focused on the task.

Restock? -
The number of times the user has restocked his list according to the inventory usage/suggestion would help me understand the metrics of how the user is perceiving the thought of doing his entire grocery list online and not rely on manual methods.

Is the User Scanning the Receipt/Barcode? -
The actual usage of a number of scanned receipts/barcodes depends on a lot of back-end capabilities, but the usage would help track how much the user has been accustomed to the new system enabling him to cut down on the time spent in manual input.

Reflect

The amount of time spent on developing screens that were secondary utilized the time frame a lot more than I would have wished. Understanding more of what is important/not important could have been a bit more for me to think upon.

If provided more time, I would like to expand the user stories to encapsulate the entire journey and bind it in a more seamless manner to support the problem statement even further.

A problem that almost everyone faces required a lot of user interviews/card sorting which posed a challenge of focusing on a particular demographic which resulted in more than one problem inputs and hence followed multiple solutions, which could've been narrowed earlier itself.