Food Buddy

OVERVIEW

Timeline: 12 Weeks
My Role: Research, User Flow, Wireframes & Video
Methodology: IBM Design Thinking Framework

DESIGN CHALLENGE

How might we solve the food insecurity crisis amongst University of Toronto Students on campus?

TEAM MEMBERS

Mehak Manwani
Vatsal Bhushan
Komal Noor
Melissa Kumaresan

Food security is a measure of the availability of food and individuals' ability to access it. Affordability is only one factor. (Wikipedia)

Our project looks at university students who study in Canada - different types of students include undergraduate students, graduate students, PhD students and students with families.

Food Buddy — a mobile-based application that will help UofT students find food within proximity of their classroom buildings so they never skip a meal.

The app facilitates pre-ordering and food delivery options.

SECONDARY RESEARCH

We conducted a literature review and visited the UofT Food Bank.

This allowed us to narrow our scope of research and choose one aspect of the problem to solve.

INTERVIEWS

We asked eight UofT participants over 1 week to share their experiences with food insecurity.

Students were recruited from different buildings around campus. The interviews were a semi-structured format that lasted about 20-25 minutes long each.

ONLINE SURVEY

We collected broader demographic data from 37 respondents, out of which 14 ate on campus “most of the time”.

It was a mix of open and close ended questions distributed through Slack, Whatsapp, and Facebook groups as well as direct messages to peers

Affinity Mapping

All qualitative data mostly from interviews, and some from open-ended questions from our surveys were analyzed through an affinity diagram.

Themes that emerged:

1. Lack of Awareness about existing solutions

2. Want Healthier Options

3. Financial Restrictions

4. Preferences & Behaviour

5. Time Constraints

6. Accessibility

7. Academic Stress

Proximity to Food Joints

Students tended to opt for food joints closest to their classroom buildings as they did not have much time in-between classes.

This had a two-fold effect:

1. If there were no real food options near their classes, they were highly likely to skip meals.

2. Eating whatever was nearby meant they had access to less-healthy options and a lesser variety of food.

“Gerstein cafe provides fresh food offerings but it’s too far from my classes so I barely ever go there.”
— UofT Undergrad Student

Financial Restrictions

7 out of the 14 students who took the survey reported that financial constraints played a significant role when they were choosing the type of food to buy on campus.

“I want to save money and not be fat. SAD.”
— UofT Grad Student

Based on students' pain points identified in our primary and secondary research, we created our persona – Samirah.

Samirah is a first-year international student from a middle-class Egyptian family. She studies computer science at UofT. Samirah is a smart student but is always stressed out because of the competitive environment at her school. Her tight budget, dietary restrictions (she can only eat halal), not being able to find food near her classes, and extremely busy schedule causes her to skip meals quite often.

To further empathize with Samirah, we curated an empathy map ( seen in the pictures below).

A day in Samirah’s life
(As-Is Scenario)

We created an as-is-scenario that walks you through a day in Samirah's life.

Here we identified the “opportunities for improvement” through voting in the as-is-scenario.
This helped us create needs statements for Samirah that acted as a springboard for the ideation phase.

Samirah Abadi…

1. Needs better access to healthier food options so she can be happy, healthy, and not gain weight.

2. Needs to find food options based on her preferences so that she does not have to compromise on her health.

3. Needs a way to find food in her short breaks so that she does not have to wait in long lines.

4. Needs reasonably priced food so that she can stay within her budget.

5. Needs a way to find food in time-crunch situations so that she does not have to skip meals.

22 IDEAS > 5 THEMES > 2 DIRECTIONS

We led ideation sessions and generated over 22 Big Ideas. Based on Samirah’s Needs Statements and Pain Points, we categorized the ideas into common themes:

1. Services

2. Personalized

3. App-based

4. Community

5. Product

We voted on which ideas made an impact and which ones were feasible.

Three ideas we decided to focus on turned out to be No Brainers:
1. Skip the Line
2. Food Finder App
3. Monthly Goal

And one idea fell under Utility:
Restaurant Finder

The Skip the Line, Food Finder App and Restaurant Finder have features overlapping with each other that address pain point such as finding food joints within proximity of classrooms.

A day in Samirah’s life in a parallel universe
(To-Be Scenario)

This is what her life could be like if we implemented our Big Ideas and introduced our mobile application solution Food Buddy.

To align our team toward a common understanding of the outcomes needed to meet our users' needs, we curated 4 design philosophies.

These design statements addressed WHO the outcome will serve, WHAT they will be able to do, and why they will care, the WOW.

1. Samirah can pre-order food so that she can skip waiting in-line.

2. Samirah can budget her monthly expenses in advance to avoid skipping any meals.

3. Samirah can find food joints within her proximity so that she can get food in less than 10 mins.

4. Samirah can find nutritious food on campus so that she can maintain her weight.

Based on our design philosophies and user needs, we began to create a low-fidelity solution. After creating the low-fidelity prototypes, we decided to perform guerilla testing at the university with students with 2 tasks. The goal was to get feedback on the concept itself rather than specific functionality.

• 4 UofT students on-campus

• Screening question – Do you eat food on-campus?

• 2 team members interviewed each student - interviewer, notetaker/observer

• Tested our prototypes of the app on paper using a think aloud protocol for a duration of 10 - 15 mins

Results

Top features liked by students:

• Pre-order would be helpful for avoiding a line up

• Food Bank option for students who are not aware about it or tight on budget (3/4 students)

• Being able to set their food preferences and dietary restrictions

User Feedback

Features suggested by students:

• Login with UofT student email and password created a sense of trust and privacy consent

• Import calendar directly linked/pre-filled through their ACORN calendar

• Option to turn on/off push notifications for Food Bank/ Breakfast/ Lunch Reminders (3/4 students)

• Delivery Feature - Students willing to pay an extra $1 or $2 for food to be delivered to them

For the second round of testing, we presented digital, clickable wireframes created on Balsamiq. The goal was to get feedback on the app's usability.

• Tested our prototypes of the app on a laptop using a think aloud protocol for a duration of 10 - 15 mins with 4 UofT students on-campus

• Conducted a Heuristic Evaluation on the prototype with 2 UX Experts where they pointed out the positive and negative aspects of the prototype with respect to NNG’s Usability Heuristics

MONTHLY BUDGET

Set and Plan

This screen is part of the initial onboarding process. Food Buddy allows users have to set a budget for their food expenses either monthly or bi-weekly. The amount can be changed anytime and the app will automatically distribute their allocated amount accordingly. This step can also be skipped and input later on.

ITERATIONS

The option to set the budget to bi-weekly has been added.

Implement app branding into visual design.

HOME

At a glance

The home screens allows users to see their meal plan for the day and discount offers that are available to them. They know at a glance how much money they have available to spend on meals for the day. They can turn on and off their notifications for each meal reminder if they are not going to spend money on that specific meal for the day for eg. if they plan to cook meals at home.

ITERATIONS

Instead of making the daily budget amount prominent, a discount offers section was added and made visible.

Added a menu item at the bottom where users can access their budget screen.

ITERATIONS

The ability to sort search by ratings have been added and as well as the function of modifying food preferences while searching.

A more defined app design system.

ITERATIONS

Images of the restaurant and the dish ordered by the user has been added.

The payment methods have been made more prominent and clearer.

Learnings

• Not many people are aware of the food insecurity problem

• Usability testing provided us with valuable feedback which we would not have anticipated otherwise

• By preparing and practicing for our playbacks, we learned how effective powerful storytelling could be

• Communicating effectively with team members

Next Steps

• Iterating our solution based on additional testing

• Research on using crowdsourcing for navigating within campus

• More research and try to find a link between food-wastage and food-insecurity

• Gamification to keep students motivated to not skip meals, eg. Starbucks points

• Coordinating with StudentLife to find out more about food wastage practices

• Possibly providing Food Buddy for other universities and workplaces