Foodible

Reducing food waste for single person households

This project was a case study of my postgraduate course Interaction Design. Our motivation for this project was to apply a portable and user-friendly reminder to persuade people to buy company items for ingredients expiring soon.
Project timeline

Oct-Dec 2022

Project type

Academic case study

Contributor

Ruoxin You
Suizi Tian
Yuan Yao
Yuke Zhang
Padakshina Goswasmi

My Contribution

User research
Product Design
Interface Design

Design Process
Background research

Literature review
Market research

User research

Survey
Interview

Ideation

Sketch
2x2 matrix

Prototype

Low-fi prototype
Hi-fi prototype

Evaluation & Iteration

Usability test
Focus group

About 13 million tonnes of food goes to waste in the United Kingdom every year. The existing practices for consumption and production of food are far from desirable. The UN Sustainable Development Goal 12 -- Responsible Consumption and Production -- targets to reduce food wastage at the retail and consumption stage by 50% through reduce, reuse, recycle strategy. This problem is multilevel and affected by farming practices, production, procurement, transportation, consumption, and so on.
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However, people do not have much awareness about the impact of their existing food practices on the environment. Several reliable estimates suggest that cereals and vegetables contribute to well-over 50% of wasted food in the UK. Our motivation was to reduce food waste by targeting a population that is generally not addressed by most existing food waste applications--single person households.
Motivation
Design to Reduce Food Waste
Background research

Lirerature review

  • Previous research mainly focus on family setting instead of individual households.
  • Most proposed solutions intervened in food storage and consumption stages. Lack of them invesgated how to reduce overbuying during shopping.

Market research

  • Existed apps address the food waste problem partly by expecting users to either reuse or recycle food.
  • The feedback about food nearing expiry wasn't sufficient to trigger a response from the user.
User research
Survey
35 participants
  • 89% of participants don’t track the food purchased, and about 74% of them don’t track expiry dates, which reflects a clear lack of a food management system.
  • 40% of the participants reported that they threw away expired food multiple times a week. Those who share kitchens with others tend to throw away expired food more frequently than those who don’t.
Interview
6 participants
  • Participants prioritize hedonistic pleasure over sustainability when purchasing and consuming food. There was a lower motivation to be sustainable.
  • Difficulty in identifying and tracking already purchased food in fridge-sharing situations leads to wastage and overbuying.
  • Participants expressed difficulty in identifying and tracking already purchased food in fridge-sharing situations, but reported that existing applications in the market were largely unhelpful and time-consuming.
  • Difficulty in identifying and tracking their own items in fridge-sharing situations leads to forgetting and wasting ingredients. This contributes to overbuying and ultimately results in food waste.
  • Users prioritize pleasure over sustainability due to hedonistic tendencies, which leads to a lack of planning and checking of existing items before shopping. This behavior contributes to overbuying and food waste.
  • Existing food management products are unhelpful and time-consuming for users, making it difficult to track food purchases and expiration dates. This contributes to the lack of motivation to keep tracking food storage.
Define Problems
How might we design a user-friendly product that facilitates and motivates users to track and manage their food?
  • Reminds users of repeated items when shopping and expired/about to expired products when cooking
  • Motivates users to keep managing food
  • Enables users to input purchased items without significant efforts
Ideation
Prototype
Evaluation
To evaluate if our design is accessible and useful in the real world, we conducted a usability test with six participants using our pilot mobile app. We coded the feedback and utilized an affinity map to categorize them. The findings mainly focused on the application functions:  
  • Interaction for consuming or sharing food items was unnatural and caused confusion
  • Environmental contributions displayed on the achievement page are not relatable to individuals
Our final design was iterated from the findings.
Final Design

Recording

  • Scan to record: users can scan and record food items while shopping.
  • Repeated item reminder: when a newly scanned food item overlaps with what already exists, the app automatically reminds the users  by a 'repeated' tag and a substitution recommendation.

Management

  • Expiring reminder: the application will automatically alert users through system pop-up notifications, the top card on the homepage, and countdown tags of the food items list items.
  • Repeated item reminder: when a newly scanned food item overlaps with what already exists, the app automatically reminds the users  by a 'repeated' tag and a substitution recommendation.
  • Feedback: a pop-up will appear and display the total quantity of carbon dioxide saved when the users finish processing.

Achievement

  • Personal contribution sum-up: the top sum-up card shows individual cumulative food savings, and the quantity of reduced carbon emission.
  • Leaderboard: the leaderboard conveys social presence to motivate users to pay attention to food waste.
  • Foodible’s contribution: a sum-up of the expected contributions from all Foodible users is presented at the end of the profile page
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