The next big system FOr IN-Home Organization
Overview
Almost all food has an expiration date, but keeping track of them in a cramped fridge can be tough. So much so, that the average family winds up wasting a third of the food they buy. That's a staggering amount of waste, and something I hoped design could help to reduce.
Role & Timeframe
UX Designer
User Research, Wireframing, Prototyping, Interaction Desing
2017 - 1 Week Project
Research
ANyone seen the mustard?
Looking into the fridge, I thought about the sheer amount of food that gets forgotten when you have 6 hungry roommates in a college house. Since most of us are on a budget, it is important to conserve food, but this can become difficult when items start going bad. Thus, I was inspired to create an app that would document the expiration dates for the contents of a fridge/pantry in order to reduce waste and better monitor food at home.
Targeting the Market
Persona
The initial step of the process was researching users and developing a "persona" to drive the app.
I focused in on mothers, a target area who wanted to limit their families environmental impact and also be a smart shopper by not wasting food. This step allowed me to better realize what features would be most important to the design. It's always great to link up ideas with a potential user in order to not stray from the main goal, the needs of the consumer.
New Item Entry
Onboarding
Design
Initial Sketches
Sketches for me often start out rough and dirty with some pops of color. Here I worked through various screen sequences and quickly determined where important tasks would take place. The pops of color can help set a mood for the project or get some additional UI ideas flowing later down the road. I needed to create an app that appealed to an entire family that would be collectively using the system. This meant standardized layouts and simple icons identifiable by both kids and parents.
Work Flow
This workflow was created to cover the main actions found in the grocery storing process. A key area was going to be minimizing the friction between unloading the groceries, entering them into the app, and storing them within the kitchen. By using a barcode scanning process users would be able to efficiently scan items in without needing tedious manual entry.
Onboarding
ENTRY SCREEN
ACCOUNT INFO
CHOOSE YOUR STORE
ADD FRIENDS
FINISHED
Home Screen
INTERACTION IDEAS
The invetory bar gives a quick snapshot of the overall food in the home. It can indicate when a grocery run must be made, and provides the user with indication of their standing.
Isolating more specific information, the side banners feature the actual status of the overall inventory. I found it was essential to separate this out into categories to give users a better idea of when each item must be eaten. Better informing them meant more food conservation.
The deck system allows for user's to peek in to each area of their kitchen for a reminder on what food is where. Forgot whether you have any Dijon left? Simply scroll through the "fridge" deck and see whether it's still there!
New item entry
The hassle of painstakingly entering in each and every food item was one of the biggest pain points of the process. Expidate solves this with a built in barcode scanner. Once scanning in the item, Expidate automatically logs the expiration date and date of purchase for the customer. Simple and easy.
FAVORITES at YOUR FINGERTIPS
Grocery buyers are often creatures of habit. We have our preferences and tend to stick with them, especially when buying food. Taking this into account I wanted to make item entry even more fluid by adding in a "favorites list" where users could in one tap add food items they have purchased in the past. This not only would help the scanning feature but could also pave the way to set up new grocery lists once food has in fact been eaten.
