FRESHELF
help reduce food waste at home
Food waste is a global problem that is becoming more and more serious. We focused on household food waste problem in this project affects our day to day life.
We designed Freshelf, an informative food management app to help users reduce food waste at home.
Duration
6 weeks, 2018 Fall
My Role - Visual Design Lead, Product Designer
Led branding, visual design, and design iteration. Contributed to user research, ideation, prototyping, and usability testing.
Overview
If you cook at home, you would probably encounter a similar situation like this: you open the fridge trying to figure out how to store the food you just bought, but you find out that lettuce you bought last week is still sitting at the corner and has already turned brown and has some dark spots on it. Even though you feel guilty, but putting it in the trash is the only thing you can do with it.
A Big Challenge
We encounter food waste on a daily basis as a consumer, from shopping, storing, preparing, cooking to eating. While food waste is an enormous problem with no simple way to solve, we focused on the food storage problem to reduce food waste and maximize the food value.
Start Big then Zoom in
While food waste is an enormous problem with no simple way to solve it,
we narrowed it down to more specific solvable pieces which are most common in our research:
• not keeping track of their inventory • lack of knowledge on food storage and usage.
The Big Picture
The domestic food waste problem is massive on the national level and family level.
According to Natural Resources Defense Council, Americans throw away more than 400 pounds of food per person annually, costing a household of four an average of $1,800 annually. Along with the wasted food, the time, energy, and resources put in to produce and storing them are also thrown away.
Key Findings
Zoom in to People's Day to Day Life
Highlight the Key Problems
We organized the interview findings by different stages of the from shop to waste process. According to the users, storing and organizing the purchased ingredient are the most problematic for them out of all:
• not keeping track of their inventory
• lack of knowledge on food storage and usage.
Available Solutions
We compared 8 apps that focus on inventory tracking that we thought could solve some of the problems,
so we have a better sense of what is effective so far and what is missing. Most of them are more focused on tracking and planning part of the process. Food storage tips are only available on one of them.
Meet the Users
Annie is an outgoing sociable young professional who is an impulsive grocery shopper and has little knowledge on how to keep food fresh.
Faye is a housewife with a part-time teaching job. She is a foodie so she tries out a lot of new recipes and ingredients but never use them up.
Pain Points
have an unorganized or stuffed fridge
forget about the ingredients they bought
not aware of the food expiration dates
lack of ingredient storage knowledge
Categorize the Solutions
We brainstormed lots of ways that would help with these situations and organized them to categories. Which drives us to decide the main focus of our product is to help users better manage their food inventory by helping them to
• keep a log of their food inventories;
• give storage tips and estimate expiration date;
• remind them of their inventory and give suggestions on ways to consume their ingredients.
Streamline the Features
Design Iterations
My Shelf
Item Detail
Design System
We followed the atomic design principle to lay the foundations and define the visual language for Freshelf. We defined our core values and design principles, then created small, independent - atomic - parts first to be combined into larger molecular structures and layouts.
CORE VALUES
fresh
helpful
friendly
knowledgable
simple
delightful
REFRESHING
ORGANIZED
SIMPLE
CONSISTANT
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
COLORS
To communicate the refreshing and delightful value of Freshelf, soft green is the primary color, with a secondary palette of sunny yellow, harvest orange, aqua blue, and a cool neutral palette.
TYPEFACE
ICONS
BUTTONS
COMPONENTS
Design Solution
Reflections
RESEARCH AND INSIGHT
Research for user experience share a lot of similarity with marketing research I have done before for brand developments, but it's also different in many senses. Empathizing with the users with a beginner's mindset is so much more important to produce a human design. Stand in the shoes of the users to see the problem as a whole helped me connecting the dots and making sense of the information we found in research.
PLAN AND PRIORITIZE
The moments where people go through in their day to day life involving food waste is scattered and diverse. The scope of the project got bigger and bigger. We went through multiple rounds of discussions on scaling it down to solvable pieces. What I learnt from this project is that for a massive problem like food waste, it's important to go back to the users' needs and prioritize on what should be the key feature of the product.