A meal planning and food management system that reduces meal planning stress while also curbing food waste habits in the houshold.
Project Overview
Background
A major contributor to global food waste is the individual household. In 2021 about 626 million tons of food waste was generated globally and the United States alone contributed 21.3 million tons. This issue had led to economic strain, overused resources, methane emissions, and food insecurity. Poor consumer habits and lack of education seem to perpetuate the issue.
Objective
Uncover the current consumer habits that lead to household food waste. Design a solution to curb those habits. Solution should support single- and multi-person housholds.
Outcome
A meal planning and food management system that allows users to log their kitchen inventory, plan their meals efficently, and prevent overbuying. The solution proved valuable to both single- and multi-person housholds in helping them control their food waste habits.
Role
UX ResearcherUX DesignerUI Designer
Time
9 Weeks
Process
Understand + Analyze
Topic Research
🎯 Goals
Understand the household food waste problem
Explore current solutions
Outline the food consumer experience
The Problem and Implications
Problem
In 2021, about ~1 billion tons of food waste was generated globally. 61% of that was from households.
Food Waste Habits
Overbuying
Lack of cooking knowledge
Throwing away food before its expiration
Lack of proper food storage
Consumer Trends
Larger households waste more food overall but single households waste more per household
Households with children waste more food
Implications
Methane Emmissions
Overused Resources
Economic Strain
Nutritional Loss
Food Insecurity
Recommended Solutions
EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
Planning: Set up meals for the week.
Storage: Learn about optimal food storage.
Prep: Prepare parts of meals to make the week's food responsibility easier.
Thriftiness: Know what is in your fridge and use it before buying more food.
USDA ( U.S. Department of Agriculture)
User Research
User Survey
🎯 Goal
Gain insight into basic food purchasing and using habits from a wide variety of consumers
Participants: 52 Age: 18 - 65 years Household size: 1 - 4 members
Majority of Participants
Use a shopping list on their phone
Buy more than what is on their shopping list
Create mental meal plans
Top 3 reasons for throwing away food
The food reaches the sell-by, use-by or best-by date.
The food doesn't look, taste, or smell right.
The food is leftovers that go uneaten.
Top 3 reasons for NOT throwing away food
Reserving guilt
Wanting to save money
Wanting to help the planet
User Interviews
🎯 Goal
Gain a more detailed picture of the food consuming/purchasing experience.
Participants: 7 Age: 24-56 years (4) single households (3) 4 person family households
Participants walked me through the following experiences
Realizing they need to buy food
How they prepare to grocery shop
Going grocery shopping
Storing their newly purchased food items
Utilizing their food items
Throwing away those same food items
Empathy Mapping
An empathy map helped me understand the similarities and differences between single- and multi-houshold memebers on a deeper level. Since I wanted to analyze each step in the food consumption process individually, I broke the empathy map into 6 steps:
Patterns
Loose Meal Plans
Those who say they meal plan produce only a grocery list based on a mental plan.
Need: A quick way to make a physical meal plan that would be as simple as making a list.
Quantity Guessing
People did not indicate item quantity on their list. They would guess based on personal experiences.
Need: People need to quantify their food needs more accurately so they do not overbuy.
Health vs Convenience and Cravings
Participants reported an intention of eating healthy through their shopping list. However, during grocery shopping, people bought unlisted unhealthy items for a convenient meal option or because of cravings.
Need: An efficient way to grocery shop for only needed items.
Financial Frustrations
People were frustrated with their large grocery bill. At the end of the week, food would be tossed out and people felt frustrated and guilty when food and money was wasted.
Need: Eliminate negative feelings through better planning.
Rotten Food Indication
People perceive produce as going bad based mostly on physical attributes (wilted, moldy, slimy, etc). They perceive processed food as bad based on any expiration date present on its container.
Need: Education on food storage and what different types of expiration dates actually mean.
User Persona
How Might We
AÂ HMWÂ session narrowed and solidify what challenges I was taking on in the app's first iteration.
Competitor Analysis
A competitior analysis directed me to possible app features and help me understand why food waste is still a problem if one was to use these apps.
Key Insights
There is no centralized place to manage the entire food purchase and consumption journey easily.
Apps with multiple features don't have efficient communication between the features, relying on the user to constantly jump around the app to get things done.
Ideate
Brainstorming
During brainstorming, I wrote out ideas that would lessen the habits of food waste. From there I color coated the main ideas and worked with matching color sticky notes to brainstorm sub ideas that would allow the main ideas to integrate/communicate with one another.
Application Map + User Flows
To narrow the scope of the app and focus on the most impactful features that would curb food waste habits, I created an application map and several user flows to guide my design.
Sketches
I split up my sketching into 5 stages. I started with Inventory followed by Recipes, Discover, Lists, and finally Plan. This order of thinking (along with the app map and user flows) made it easier to see the how each tab connected to the others.
Wireframes
I then created mild-fidelity prototypes to focus the app’s functionality before moving on to visual design.
High Fidelity Prototype
Logo
Typography
Heading - Inter, Semi bold, 20
Subheading - Inter, Semi bold, 16
Body - Inter, Regular, 16
Details - Inter, Regular, 14
Buttons
Primary
Secondary
Tertiary
Inactive
Icons
Colors
Validate
Usability Testing
Participants went through the features and functionality of the app. The session eneded with a post interview on overall thoughts. I created an affinity map with the information collected during each session.
Participants: 7 Age: 24-56 years (3) single households (4) 4 person family households
Overall Thoughts
Those who lived in a 4 person family household were more likely to use most, if not all, of the sections of this app. These participants felt the app was user friendly and would relieve the pressure and stress of having to plan a week's worth of meals for their whole family. They also felt it would decrease their overspending/buying habits which in turn would reduce their food waste.
When it came to single person households, participants said they would only use certain parts of the app: lists, inventory and the recipe collection. Most would not use the planning functionality. These participants felt the app would fix their habit of forgetting produce in their fridge and letting it go unused.
Pain Points
It was unclear what the inventory count on recipes and meal plans meant. They wanted to know how many ingredients were in the recipe/meal plan.
Participants would’ve liked to add more than just meals to their schedule (wanted grocery shopping day and multiple prep days).
It was unclear how the app would know when their items would expire if they added food items that were not already fresh.
Iterate
Modify the inventory indicator on recipe and meal plan cards
Add options to schedule a prep day and grocery trip
Change “Expiring” notification and tab meaning under “Inventory”
Final Prototype - Main Features
Discover
For those who can’t cook or plan, Planit offers full fledged meal plans and recipes. Discover also offers educational resources to reduce household food waste.
Main Features
Food waste articles
Meal Plans - day by day plan, full grocery list, preparation tasks, equipment suggestions, adjustable servings
Recipes - adjustable servings
Inventory availablity status on all meal plans and recipes
Plan
The Plan tab is split between a multi-view meal schedule and a meal plan collection. Users can schedule meals, a full meal plan, prep days, and shopping days. Users can also build out a meal plan using their own collection of recipes.
Main Features
Adding a single meal on 1+ days
Drag and dropping recipes from recipes collection into the schedule
Adding an entire meal plan to the schedule
Creating your own meal plan
Adding needed groceries for scheduled meals to a shopping list
Lists
The Lists tab is a collection of shopping checklists that can be private or shared between household memebers.
Main Features
Each item listed has “item info”: inventory status, storage information, and suggested recipes
Sending checked off item to the user’s inventory
Inventory availablity status on listed items
Shopping mode: Grocery store map and checklist view that will help users get through their grocery list quickly and efficiently
Store map
Item’s location and availablity status
Fastest shopping route list organization
Recipes
The Recipes tab houses all the recipes of the Planit account. All houshold memebers connected to the same Planit account can access all the same recipes.
Main Features
Adding new recipe via:
Manual input
Pasting recipe URL
Recipes scanning
Inventory
The Inventory tab is where users log the groceries currently in their kitchen. This allows them to keep track of their staples, groceries they need to use soon, and groceries they have ran out of. Inventory item status will be seen throughout the app on recipe ingredients, meal plan grocery lists, and items on the users grocery lists.
Main Features
Adding items with custom quantities
Setting grocery staples
Adding items to user’s shopping lists
Being notified of items users should use soon based on how long they have been in inventory
Being notified of items users are out of
Each item listed has “item info”: inventory status, storage information, and suggested recipes.
Reflection + Next Steps
If I were to do this project again, I would have done usability testing in the wireframes phase to make sure I was on the right path before going on to visual design. Moving forward this will be something I do for new features.
I designed this app as a way for people to control their food waste habits. It was important to me that I targeted the habits of food waste to make user’s lives easier, rather than harping on food waste education and its effects on society and climate change. I’m happy with the result of this project, however I do consider it an MVP. There is a lot more testing and accessibility features I would like to add. Therefore, my next steps would be:
Usability testing. Testing the app with the modifications made.
Iterate. Make any adjustments needed from the last usability test.
Build to beta test. Collect data on usablity and the app's ability to reduce food waste in the houshold. This will require a prior assesment of the current food waste amount.
