I was tasked with identifying pain points regarding experiencing food insecurity as a university student and designing an interface equipping students with the know-how and skills needed to alleviate some of the burdens and stressors of cooking and eating as a college student.
Problem
How might we create a supportive & sustainable community for students to relieve the social & mental burdens of food insecurity?
39% of undergraduates and 23% of graduates at 4-year universities experience food insecurity. Among these students, food insecurity adversely affects 74% minorities: LGBTQ, POC, etc. ā students living independently without external financial support
Along with worrying about having enough food, students also worry about having to set aside time for cooking and the stigma they face reaching out to available resources.
User Research
During the process of researching, I understood that we couldn't realistically eliminate the financial burdens of food insecure individuals. Instead, I wanted to better understand pain points in their lifestyle and address them with clever and thoughtful design solutions.
Through user interviews, I found the following key factors that students consider when sourcing and consuming food:
- 100% value affordability
- A lot of students donāt know where the best places to buy groceries near campus are and donāt want to sacrifice quality for affordability
- 89% value time and convenience
- Students donāt want to have to sacrifice time where they could be studying or working to cook and eat convenient and nutritious meals
- Wanting to effectively use up the groceries they buy before they inevitably go bad to avoid unnecessary food waste
- 89% value nutrition
- Tired of having to settle for fast but unhealthy options to save on time
- 44% value enjoyment and variety
- Tired of meal prepping and having the same meal everyday for a week, but not wanting to spend a lot of time and money just to have a variety of meals in a week
Taking these user priorities into account, I wanted to approach designing this platform in a way that would help them save time and money when deciding on what to cook and eat.
- Education
- Providing students with classes and hosting events that teach them and give them the necessary tools to overcome challenges created by food insecurity
- Emphasizing the importance of sustainability efforts
- Resources
- Connecting students with helpful resources and deals to help them save on groceries and food
- Giving students access to a wide range of recipes that allow them to effectively utilize the ingredients and food they currently have at their disposal
- Community
- Creating avenues for students to seek out support and community to help and ease the burdens of food insecurity
Process
I started brainstorming as many application ideas as possible and finding ways to seamlessly combine them into a single interface. After multiple rounds of brainstorming, we settled on a platform that would allow students to:
- Host a shared community
- Centralize all local food resources
- Recommend nutritious, hearty, and affordable recipes
User Flow
We initially began with five primary features and continuously pruned and introduced new functionalities based on user feedback. The first prototype included:
- A social feed for sharing recipes and initiating meetups
- A recipe search-and-browse page
- A pantry that keeps track of leftover ingredients
- A map that visualizes local events and stores
- A chat room with fellow users and peer help services
Based on an initial round of user testing, I implemented the following changes based on critiques and suggestions from people who tested my low-fidelity mockups.
- The social feed and chat function was overwhelming and detracts from the objective of finding affordable and convenient recipes.
- Rather than leaning in the social aspect of the interface, have options in place for users who want to engage and focus more on the recipe/cooking aspect.
- I also created a new homepage in place of the social page where users could find events being hosted and deals that were being offered.
- The recipe page was too boundless and hard to navigate. Users had a hard time finding recipes that were suitable for their specific situation and circumstances.
- To clean up the experience here, I added tags for recipes and new sorting options by skill-level and recipe tags. If users ever encountered a recipe they enjoyed using or would like to save for later, I also designed a bookmark page that would allow them to save and organize recipes based on their personal preferences
- The map page was extraneous and most users barely interacted with this part of the interface.
- Instead of dedicating an entire page to the feature, I decided to embed a map in relevant location and event cards to promote a more seamless experience.
- A big portion of the comments during usability tests revolved around the notion that it would be much more helpful for users to find recipes based on existing ingredients they possess ā not having to go out and shop for things and eliminating the trouble of decision making
- So instead of having the pantry to keep track of leftover ingredients, I designed a function that would help users save and simplify meal decisions by way of generating recipes based on a userās said ingredients which would also help promote sustainability.
Results
Home Page
Upon entering the app, the user lands here and can access any deals and promotions from participating stores and locations and check out any upcoming events that they can attend.
If they want more details on events, they can tap on the relevant card to expand and find information including map location, host, and event details.
Discover
The implementation of the Discover tab was to allow users to find inspiration available in recipes that are trending with other users and to browse new recipes being published
Sitting at the center of the page is a card promoting recently added recipes and scrolling down shows users what other people using the app have been cooking, allowing them to choose what recipes to use based on whatās popular with other people.
If thereās anything that piques their interest, users can bookmark interesting recipes and add them to relevant folders to browse through later in the Bookmarks tab
If there are specific recipes people want to search for, clicking the search bar will allow users to search based on specific keywords, and even filter down their search results based on criteria including skill-level, budget, time, and dietary restrictions.
Underneath the search bar sits a card directing users to the Recipe page, which finds recipes based on the ingredients they input themselves.
Recipes
A big issue discovered throughout multiple stages of user research was that many students let perishable ingredients go bad because they donāt know how to use them concurrently with the other ingredients they possess
To combat this, the Recipes tab was designed so that users could input a specific set of ingredients they want to use and find relevant recipes that would allow them to successfully use up perishable items. Giving users the ability to choose the ingredients they want to use while also bringing their attention to recipes they may have otherwise overlooked while browsing on the Discover tab
Bookmarks
Given the open-ended nature of the rest of the platform where users search and use recipes based on their needs and preferences at the time of cooking, the Bookmarks tab was implemented to allow users to save recipes they enjoyed or to come back to later. They can directly access recipes theyāve bookmarked that have been stored in specific folders.
Next Steps
After fleshing out the holistic design vision for the platform, Iād like to spend more time thinking of ways to help students not just in the kitchen but also outside. Given that weāve now equipped students with the know-how and the capabilities to tackle intimidating obstacles associated with food insecurity, I want to direct focus onto providing more tangible, offline resources for them to refer to via the promoted events section of the app and explore this design idea as an avenue for expanding beyond the confines of being ājust a recipe platform.ā