SensiFI

For this project, research was very crucial to understand the whole food cycle and human behavior towards food waste. This set the base of what to look for in interviews and observations. So, research was divided in three parts: Secondary Research, Field observations and User Interviews.

I went through 13 research papers and articles to understand 3 main things which were:

• Impact: How badly food waste impacts the environment, what are the loopholes in the entire process.

• Reasons behind food waste: I tried to understand the reasons behind the food waste. Why is food waste happening at home? What is human behavior behind the food waste.

• Sensors: Lastly, I tried to do research on which types of sensors are there(if any) which can measure the real time food quality of the food.

I went through 13 research papers and articles to understand 3 main things which were:

• Goal:
  To understand the grocery shopping habits of humans and to understand why people don’t like empty space in their fridge, how they store the food items in the refrigerator.

• How did I do it?
  I went to the supermarket to observe and understand the grocery shopping habits of humans. I observed people’s refrigerators to understand who stored the food in the refrigerator and during my secondary research I came to know that generally people don’t like empty space in their refrigerator so they keep overbuying and keep stocking up the food in the fridge.

For user interviews, I interviewed 2 users: One is a 25 year old graduate student and second is a working professional who has to travel frequently for work purposes.

• Goal:
  The goal of doing user interviews was to learn and understand “why” the problem.

• How did I do it?
  The interviews were conducted in an unstructured setup, more like a conversation to get more insights from the users. However, in order to ensure that we get a consensus among the findings, the team created a basic set of questionnaires to serve as a guideline during the interviews. The full set of research questions you will find here. [LINK]

During the secondary research I came to know that the highest number of food waste is coming from homes which is 43% !!

During our primary research and secondary research we analyse that these are the 4 major reasons behind the food waste at home, so, these are the root causes for the problem.

I along with the team posted all our findings on a Figjam board where we used affinity mapping to identify themes and group findings according to themes.

After that, along with the team, we created the empathy map as well. During our secondary research we came to know that consumer behavior plays a major role in food waste. So we thought in order to find the solution for the problem of food waste, we have to understand the consumer behavior in this direction.

The research conducted so far helped us to uncover two target behavioral archetypes: “unaware consumer” and “aware but not practicing consumer”. The following two quotes respectively portray how they think and feels:

Our design solution must have these rationale in order to solve the problem of “How might we help people to manage their food inventory at home and thereby reduce food wastage at home?”

• The solution should decrease the human intervention and cognitive load in order to manage their food inventory like checking the food quality, keep thinking about what they have in their refrigerator etc.

• The solution should be quick and easy to use so that it can be helpful to students and working professionals.

We performed 3 brainstorming sessions to find the solution to the problem.

This helped us collect ideas from all possible directions. The task of narrowing down the ideas was done into 2 parts.

Therefore, coming to SensiFI was an iterative process and an amalgam of ideas from all the 3 sessions.

Use Case 1:

The proposed app will notify Amanda, who works a full-time job and frequently forgets about the items in her refrigerator, about the expiration dates of the food inside so that she may cook it and prevent it from being thrown out.

Use Case 2:

The app reminds Jake of the expiration dates of the food items in his home, but since he is a student, he doesn’t have enough knowledge about cooking and doesn’t know how to utilize all the expiring items.

Wireframes were drawn on a whiteboard during this stage. We carefully considered what should go where on each screen. It was simpler to edit the modifications in various iterations when using a whiteboard.

After making designs and prototyping it was a time to do evaluations of the designs. So, for the design evaluations, heuristic and expert evaluations and usability testing(Think Aloud method) of five potential users were conducted. The results of the evaluations were as follows:

• They really liked the idea of using a sensor to track the real time food expiration date so that now they are free from checking the quality of the food everyday.

• Users were in love with the micro-animations and interactions which help them to understand the usage of different components of the application.

• Users also liked the idea of alert messages they are getting about the food items which need their attention and they were amazed by the widget option as well.

• Many users gave positive feedback about the recipe section where they are getting the suggestions of the recipe based on the maximum number of food items they have in their inventory and based on the food items which are going to expire soon.

• Some of the writing and labeling of the application was a bit confusing for the users. i.e the food which was already expired was labeled as “00 days remaining” so users were confused about that.

• The users were not able to execute an undo operation if they have marked an item as “used”.

• The users felt the need for more detailed onboarding and walkthrough of the app when they use this app for the first time because integrating sensors with mobile phones is something they don’t do frequently so it’s a kind of new thing for them.