Re-serve
Overview
Food waste is one of the major threats to our generation, especially in the metro cities, this idea helps to connect and share surplus or extra food to food insecurity people in the neighborhood through NGO's and volunteers.
It's a locality-based network, restaurants or other food donors in the neighborhood will contribute to the homeless of the same locality.
Role
User Researcher and Designer —
UX and UI Design
Year: 2020
The problem
Connect the excess food producers with people in need. Create awareness among people about the impact of food waste and reduce it at the same time, it should reach right people, those who can work or able earn they should not get at same time.
Problem Statement
Defeat the wastage of excess food and answer the starvation problem at the same time.
Secondary Objective: To reduce the wastage of food by creating awareness.
The design process
The scope of the project included all phases of the Double Diamond Method.
D1—Discover
Project brief
Bangalore. A city known for old markets, shining malls & IT companies. What brings them all together is food! The city is dotted with cafes, restaurants, hotels, fast food outlets, with so many places producing food, at the same time there is also a lot of leftover food. Not only the food which was served and not eaten, at the same time a lot of food that never reached the plate.
A lot of food is “too good to go”.
On the other hand, the city also has a lot of old age homes, orphanages, labor camps, there are people who struggle for a square meal daily. Not just because they don’t have money but also because of health conditions that do not allow them to work earn their own bread. Project “Re-Serve” aims to bring the excess food to the people who need it and bring joy to the life of some people.
Business requirements
A platform should connect the excess food producers like restaurants, event management, and corporate companies food canteens to connect the people in need like NGO’s, orphanages, old age homes, leveraging both establishments to open the opportunity for volunteers to create a win-win situation for all, at the same time a strategy needs to be created for bringing the awareness on food waste among people.
Research
To increase the better understanding of how I could more effectively address this problem, I conducted a series of user interviews with food donors, needly NGO’s and people who do volunteer, also conducted market surveys and secondary research.
These are contextual interview questions for an NGO :
— Do you use any method to check the quality of the food?
— Everyday you distribute in the same place?
— How often you search for a new food source or you depend on the same source?
— Is the donor or you have any legal agreement?
— How do you transport donor place to distribution place?
— What your idea about how much quality food wasted in a city like Bangalore?
— Have you done any surveys on food waste?
— Since how long you're doing this cause?
— What motivation keeps you for this cause?
— You’re working for a good cause how do you source surplus food?
— So you get surplus food every day?
— Where do you distribute?
— Food that you get all are edible by the time you distribute?
— Normal days what quantity of food you get?
Secondary research
As secondary research says, food waste is one of the major threats to our generation, especially in metro cities, food waste causes an imbalance in food production and agriculture which results in increasing the demand for food, on the other hand, people are suffering to get their basic food. To understand the factors involved in the process of food waste, another important insight: most people don’t volunteer because they simply aren’t asked to.
It is indefensible to throw away good food when people are hungry, in the city many restaurants are contributing food for doing the right thing but the still large part restaurants, corporate office canteen, premium star hotels are not ready to share their surplus food for the right cause, I am finding a way to rescue their excess food and pass it on to those who need it.
Explanation of exploration
Once I completed surveying and conducting 12 user interviews, used affinity mapping to find common themes in the data collected. As a result of this activity, I am able to discover several major trends that we needed to address in the next phase of the design process.
Contextual interview data of food requester
D2—Define
Affinity map for NGO
User persona
Post distillation, I was trying to empathize with my target audience and did my research on user persona and I evaluated it into three groups. It allowed me to get to the root cause of the problem and a better solution as the output, here are those three groups of persona in brief.
User Journey
Started with As is journey map' by empathizing with a persona, while mapping the journey I noticed the moments of delight, pain, drop-off points, motivation and opportunities. I started to measure the improvements to implement the next process of root cause analysis.
Root cause analysis (RCA)
The 5 Whys method uses a series of questions to drill down into successive layers of a problem, the point is to peel away surface-level issues to get to the root cause using the same method for all the problems, here this the one of the
problem exploration.
Concept mapping
Once the persona, journey map, and RCA was defined, I started visualizing the hypothesis using the technique of 'concept mapping', which has started giving me key ideas connection between many points in a hierarchical, the multi-
level fashion. My idea is to improve meta-cognition and to develop logical thinking and effective field study by revealing the connections between the challenging problems to think beyond single thoughts or specific facts to see the bigger picture.
D4—Developing a solution
Content prioritization
Dwight D. Eisenhower's approach used to prioritise the content and often have two kinds of problems, one is urgent and the important in every task, the urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." With this approach, activities are distributed to one of four quadrants, here is the food requester flow exportation.
IA for food requester
Task flow for food requester
Wireframe for food requester
UI approach
Style guide
UI for food requester
