foodrunners to the rescue!

Food Conservation for busy san franciscans

Our client, Food runners, wants to expand its mission to include to educate people about food conservation. Our idea to achieve this mission is by designing a mobile experience which makes it convenient to donate/share food with the community and by giving people access to donation bins in their own neighbourhood.

Team & Duration

I worked as a UX designer, focusing on research, sketching, and overall service design strategy. I worked closely with two other UX designers, Anshula Dekate and Kyle Torres, conducting research and concept ideation.

From concept to launch, this project lasted two weeks.

Tools & Methods

• Design Strategy & Concept Design

• Interaction & Service Design for responsive web/product launch

• Paper concept sketches

• Surveys & User Interviews

• Contextual Inquiry

• Usability Testing

the opportunity

How might we get people to care about their food waste in their day-to-day lives?

The biggest challenge facing FoodRunners is expanding their food conservation efforts beyond a business focus towards influencing the behaviors of regular people.

We learned early on that food waste is a symptom of a deeper problem: People do not use the food in their fridge due to forgetfulness and they don’t know where to donate their food when they do remember to donate excess food.

As a result, people often throw away food they could have eaten or donated had they remembered their perishable food inventory.

solution

1. Provide easily accessible information for people to make better food conservation decisions

2. Provide interactive donation bins at regularly visited locations in the neighborhood

We want to support people’s access to donation bins at their local neighborhood grocery stores, cafes, and restaurants by providing a one-stop website for donation bin locations, fridge inventory monitoring, and food conservation tips and tricks.

We designed a prototype donation bin that enabled people to easily donate their excess food while learning about food conservation impact facts and how FoodRunners can assist food conservation tactics at home. Most impactfully, the donation bins possessed a community PIN that allows anyone to make a noncommittal donation while informing them of the use of a personal pin for rewards.

what motivates people to change their behavior?

Observe in the wild

We started to learn about food banks and the food cycle: how did it work? We visited Cameron House in Chinatown, SF where we interviewed the front desk about how their food pantry works and how people can donate.

Turns out that the accessibility of food donations and pantries is segregated.

See what others are doing better (or worse)

We did some competitive analysis of other organizations focused on recruiting people to take action on social causes, and compared it to FoodRunners’ website and outreach strategies.

We found that FoodRunners was lacking in motivating calls to action, actionable information for SF residents, and no motivational factors such as the other websites, like compelling visuals, relatable facts, and the impact of their decisions with feedback from their efforts.

Listen to the trends

After gaining so much data about people’s current food conservation efforts and motivations, we discovered insights and common themes for our solution proposal.

We learned a lot about the obstacles people face and started brainstorming on what our solution can do to make it easier to waste less food in their daily lives.

With all our insights, we distilled our research to two personas that FoodRunners’ target audience: a “somewhat socially conscious” person and a “not so socially conscious” person.

proposed solutions

Fridge Inventory + Education Center Prototype

We decided to redesign FoodRunners’ current website using a mobile responsive approach that would allow users to proactively keep track of their perishable food items in an effort to prevent waste. A user would be able to keep track of their current fridge inventory, and can view it on their phone while they grocery shop to know what they need or don’t need to buy. It also can remind them of what food they should use or donate by expiration date, so they don’t waste food unnecessarily. This solves the forgetfulness that our research results emphasized as a big obstacle to why people throw away edible food.

Donation Bins

Our second part of the solution is to provide a convenient option to donate edible food items that a person may not want to throw away or hasn’t been able to use in their home. Once people are keeping track of their food in the fridge, and decide they won’t have time to eat or use the food they have, they now have the choice of donating to someone in need versus throwing it away. These donation bins would be in front of locations like local grocery stores, restaurants, and cafes, where people can drop off their leftover food in a safe, efficient system.

A positive first step, but challenges remain…

Overall, our research suggested that FoodRunners has many opportunities to be a community leader in food environmentalism.

Our assumptions are that it would require more staff and employees to create a smooth donation cycle within neighborhoods, as well as outreach and marketing tactics to advertise their actionable tips and methods to conserve food in daily life. Since this is a concept project, we would want to talk to FoodRunners and understand their budget, manpower, system equipment, and constraints to see if our proposed solutions are feasible.

Based on our research, I feel confident that implementing these features on the FoodRunners website could dramatically improve food conservation habits of San Franciscans, helping promote good food environmentalism practices.