Background

As part of a design challenge, I was tasked to create a solution to help students decrease waste. With 22 million pounds of food produced yearly from universities nationwide, I decided to target minimizing food waste in college student populations living on campus.

Eco-fridge is a mobile and fridge tablet application that motivates college students to reduce food waste through the recollection of ingredients and maximization of their usage.

User Research

Understanding college student food waste habits

Due to the limited timeline of the challenge, I conducted six 1:1 interviews with college students living on their campuses and created a survey receiving ~100 respondents.

Synthesizing findings

After receiving the responses, I created an affinity map to narrow down the problem space and define user needs.

Consolidating findings, I separated them into three main areas and summarized the data:

Overestimating spoiling times

College students lack accuracy in knowing the spoiling times of food, especially produce.

Difficulty tracking fridge items

With a busy schedule, it is often difficult to track what food they have - it goes bad before they can eat it.

Affinity Map

Change in food habits

Transitioning to living away from home, students are faced with a change in food habits. They often don't know how much to purchase, what to buy, and lack plans in utilizing their items.

Developing the User

User persona

Keeping the user at the forefront of the design process, I developed a persona encapsulating the main pain points discovered.

To be representative of the majority of my research participants, I decided to focus on students without dining hall plans as my user.

Ideation

Low-fidelity sketches
‍and ideations

Having the user pain points, I began ideating through low-fidelity sketches and iterated through various solutions, ranking them by effort and impact to narrow down the selection.

Solution

Eco-fridge: A fridge tablet and mobile application promoting active recall
of ingredients.

With a large amount of food waste coming from refrigerated produce and perishable goods, I decided to focus on a fridge application.

Eco-fridge features a fridge tablet or mobile application for greater accessibility.

Features

01
Lists remaining ingredients and estimated expiration

Targets the pain point of students having difficulty tracking food items they have and gauging spoiling times. The application seeks to be a one-stop source to recall and acknowledge ingredients to promote usage.

To empathize with a change in food habits living away from home, Eco-fridge minimizes time for students deciding what to make. It also motivates them to incorporate items expiring soon into their meals.

02
Generates recipes using existing items

03
Compostability labels

To further reduce food waste and promote positive environmental impact, ingredients contain a compostability label to sort tossing of goods if necessary.

Design Iterations

Complexity removal

Running usability testing, the "Generate Recipes" button on the "Items" screen did not provide a logical flow, as users assumed that was all the app could do. I instead moved this to a second slider screen.

I went between iterations, finding that checking off labels provided ease in updating quantities with sliding scale to toggle count through fractions rather than just whole count.

Simplifying recipe generation

When users navigated to generate recipes, they were initially required to input a quantity of ingredients to use. Users often did not know how much a recipe required or would forget how much they had.

The iterated design removes quantity selection by allowing the user to solely select which ingredients to use. Recipes are then generated to maximize the quantity of your ingredients instead, with the option to lower serving size to use less if preferred.

Final Prototype

Ingredient list

Lists quantities and estimated expirations of ingredients in the fridge.

Features a compostability label to further education in sustainable practices if food waste is necessary.

Recipe generator

Want to make a meal out of your ingredients? Select custom ingredients or generate recipes from any of your items.

Maximize usage and prevent food waste by incorporating ingredients expiring soon.

Convenience
‍features

The generate list includes serving size, cooking time, and a compostability tag.

Learnings

Designing around sensitive topics.

Through my user interviews, I noticed that discussing food waste was often a sensitive topic - at times bringing up feelings or guilt or cultural values. It’s essential to create a safe space during interviews and bring empathy throughout all steps of the design process.

The impact of design.

As someone who focuses on making a difference through design, I enjoyed working this project addressing an environmental issue. Design is so broad and can be applicable in endless problem spaces. Its ability to make change has consistently been something inspiring to me.

Eco-Fridge