Usability Studies – Affinity Mapping
Product
This is an app that will help reduce food waste from households or by individuals who want to help the community. The app will let users keep track of their pantry, avoid hoarding food items at home and also help individuals buy food at nominal prices.
Project duration - April to May 2022
My role
UX Designer designing an app and responsive website for helping people reduce food waste.
Responsibilities
Conducting user interviews, competitive analysis, creating personas, identifying pain points and defining problem statements, creating user stories and journeys, storyboarding, wireframing and prototyping and iterating on designs.
User Research
Conducted surveys and interviews to identify users who were interested in helping the community to reduce food waste. A primary user group was identified, aged 18-50 and created personas based on my qualitative and quantitative research.
Identifying pain points
No time or facility for cooking meals
Difficulty in finding food that is inexpensive and healthy
Purchases more than
what is required
WASTAGE OF FOOD
Food stays in the pantry
for more than the expiry
dates and ends up in the
garbage later
SPENDS MORE
Difficulty keeping track of food in pantry when shopping for groceries
FOOD TRACKING
ACCESS TO
FOOD OPTIONS
TIME CONSTRAINTS
Persona
User journey map
Mapping Clara’s journey revealed the usefulness of the application in terms of tracking food in Clara’s pantry, healthy snack options for her kids and helping the community by reducing food waste.
​
Mapping John’s journey revealed that food can be available at all times, that can be purchased at nominal prices and can be healthy too at the same time.
Starting the design
Digital wireframes
Flow 1 – Order food through the app
Flow 2 – Keep track of food in the pantry
The low fidelity prototype shows two flows:
1. Order food through the app
2. Keeping track of food in the pantry
Clickable wireframe
Usability Studies – Affinity Mapping
Usability Study: Findings
I conducted one round of usability study. Findings from this study helped me to iterate my low-fidelity prototypes to high-fidelity prototypes. Here are some of the findings from this study:
1
Options need to be specified in the menu
2
No sign up or sign in screens for getting personalized options
3
No search bar to find a location or enter postal code
Mockups
Hi-fidelity prototypes
The final prototype shows two flows:
1.Users will be able to order food in nominal prices and healthy with plenty of options to choose.
2.Users will be able to keep track of their pantry and help the community in reducing food waste.
Clickable prototype
Responsive Web Design
The designs for the screen size variations included mobile, tablet and desktop. I optimized the designs to fit the specific user needs of each device and screen size.
MOBILE
TABLET
DESKTOP
Accessibility considerations
Accessibility allows users of all abilities to understand, use and enjoy the web. As designers, it is our responsibility to make sure we design in a way that is usable to all users irrespective of their situation, abilities or context.
Adhering to the WCAG principles and guidelines, some of the accessibility considerations for this product were:
- Text alternatives & consistency: Icons have labels for users to quickly recognize, so they could navigate from screen to screen with ease.
- Use of colour: Information has been specified not only by using colour, but with a combination of text, graphical objects and colour. CTAs have a contrasting ratio of 3:1 for readability and quick recognition.
- Consistent UI: Use of consistent buttons that have the same functionality to help identify different components on different screens. People with difficulty reading text are highly benefitted from this.
Takeaways
Impact:
The application will be a great way to help the community in reducing food waste by helping users keep track of the food in their home and order food that is healthy and inexpensive.
What I learned:
While designing the app, I learnt that the initial drafts/ wireframes are only the beginning in the process of addressing issues that the users face. I also understood the importance of keeping the user in mind always while making iterations to the product for delivering a better user experience.
Next steps
Next steps
Conduct another round of usability studies to validate the pain points that I am addressing through my designs
1
Conduct more user research to identify any more user needs