Food Accessibility - Food Buddy

Role
UX Designer

Time
09.2022 - 11.2021 (3 months)

Team
Anny Chen, Ali Ali, Yan Li

Skills
UX Design, UX Research, User Interview, Survey, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Competitive Analysis, Wireframing

Tools
Figma

 

Problem

The goal is to address the difficulties of accessing free food resources. There are free food and groceries available in many places, but some people are not able to access the free resources due to insufficient information and transportation constraints. We aim to find creative ways to solve this problem.

💡Solution

Food Buddy is a mobile app that provides users with information related to events and organizations that offer free food, connects users with a chatting feature, and provides users with transportation options.

 

✍️ Design Process

 

💁 Who are the stakeholders?

Our team conducted five user interviews to learn more about the current experience of getting free food.

  • Three of the interviewees are UM students, which are the major user group in getting free food in the Ann Arbor area.

  • Two interviewees are from the Detroit community and attend cultural events that offer free food.

Pain points of the target groups:

1. Ease of access: Users decide whether to go get free food by distance and time flexibility.

2. Types of food: Users tend to check the type of food before heading to the places.

3. Freshness of food: Users check the expiration date before taking the food.

⚡️ Design Rationale

  • 5 Stakeholder interviews

  • 22 Survey respondents

  • 3 Usability tests with target users

  • In the initial design, we made the message-sharing feature and the link-sharing feature separate.

    However, one participant in the usability testing found it confusing. Hence, we made the sharing features uniform throughout the pages by integrating them into one functionality. The new design also facilitates information sharing.

 
 

  • All the interviewees in our usability testing gave positive feedback for the instant “Comments” feature. We observed that users highly value information about the current status of an event. As a result, we have decided to prioritize the "Comments" section by moving it to the top of the page in the final design.

 
 

  • We learned from the usability testing that people would like to save the events they want to go to in advance and get a reminder. Hence, we made the saved plan page an individual icon on the navigation menu, so the users can check their saved plans with just one click. This also ensures users have timely information about the activities they are particularly interested in.

  • Users can also see past saved plans to help users track their past participation and sort their preferences for activities.

 
 

  • From the user feedback, there was a concern about who the driver is and who the other passengers are in a carpool session. To address this issue and provide feelings of security, we added the time for a carpooling session, and the driver’s major on the detail popup to ensure people a safe carpooling experience.