Fun With Food
Fun With Food, is a way cook healthy and delicious meals with pantry-provided foods for the whole family!
Team:
My Role:
User Research, UX Design, Concept design, Wireframes, User Testing, & Prototyping
Editing: Yena Kim | Illustrations: Audra Walker
The Challenge
The pandemic has dramatically increased food insecurity and straining an extremely stressed supply. In addition, loss of employment and income continue to increase demand for charitable food delivery and meal offerings. Everyone involved in the food supply chain is interested in advancing the quality of groceries and cooked meals and increasing the nutritional value of the food for families - This is a shared goal for non-profit organizations, kitchens, pantries, food banks, distributors, and recipients alike. Our challenge is to empower a specific audience and issue to help improve part of the food collection and distribution chain.
Insights
Our research revealed that the poverty rate for single-mother families in 2019 was 31% compared to 5% for married-couple families. Therefore, we realized that single mothers would be our focus since they needed our help. Furthermore, one Salient obstacle we discovered through our interviews was that mothers were constantly struggling with feeding their children healthy food. The primary reason for that was due to lack of knowledge and time.
We knew we needed to find a cost-effective and time-efficient method for single parents to provide their children healthy nutrient food, meanwhile educating both parent and child in cooking and meal prep skills by engaging the whole family.
HOW MIGHT
WE...
Encourage food insecure parents in Los Angeles to cook healthy meals for their families?
What is our solution?
Fun With Food
An app that delivers groceries from food pantries straight to families’ homes, along with recipes based off the groceries and games based off the recipes.
Observations
interviews
secondary research
Ideation
Final Outcome
The Process
“I definitely feel like I never have enough time with my kid… but I understand that it's my responsibility to be able to financially support myself and my son.”
- Scarlet Carter
Interviews
Scarlett Carter
23 | Single mother of 1
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Her son is extremely picky with food
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The breakthrough moment was when he started to cook for himself
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Cooking together gave him the courage to try new things
Interview with Lee. Interviewr: Audra Walker
Lee Puckhaber
44 | Single mother of 2
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Felt insecure about feeding her first child
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Likes to pre-order groceries in order to save time
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Lee finds that recipes make cooking much easier and less time consuming
Interview with Lee. Interviewr: Audra Walker
“Recipes are something that’s made cooking a lot easier. Hayes’s dad and I used to get Blue Apron meal kits, I learned a lot of skills.”
- Lee Puckhaber
Insights
1.
Involving Kids
Scarlett mentioned that cooking and grocery shopping together helped her exponentially with getting Elliot to eat healthy foods. Since most kids are picky eaters like Elliot, parents oftentimes need to get creative.
2.
Time Contraints
During our research, we found that most single moms wanted to have the ability to spend more time with their children, but the obstacle of juggling a full-time job and while trying to support their necessitates prevented them from doing so.
3.
Limited knowleage
Another obstacle that we found mothers were facing was that even dough they had used pantry services before, limited cooking skills and knowledge caused insecurity on what to do with the provided groceries.
IDEATION
The User
Based on the conducted research, we establish our persona, Maria. She represents the target audience, their pain points, and their need.
Maria Diaz
34 | Single mother of 2
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Works full-time at a grocery store
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Receives food stamps from CalFresh.
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No time left to plan and prepare healthy meals for her family.
"I know the amount of take out food I feed my children can't be good, but I can't find the time or money to grocery shop for healthier foods."
User Journey Map
This journey maps illustrate the situation where our personas, Maria, are searching for food assistance/recourses.
Moments That Matters
Based on the two journey maps we created for each persona, we analyzed and identified the most Operational, Unique & High-value moments.
Concept Poster
Based on our research and the moments we found to matter the most to our target audience, we brainstormed for different solutions.
Paper Prototype
Paper Prototype | Yena Kim
Wireframes
Now it was time to create digital wireframes of the app to better understand how we wanted the desired layout and interaction patterns to look.
PROGRESS
BAR
STICKY
NAVBAR
HAMBURGER
MENU
Wireframes | Julia Wetterdal
FINAL OUTCOME
Prototype
This all leads us to our final outcome, which is an innovative app that would provide families in need with a weekly food box from a local pantry, and at the same time, be an interactive way to teach and involving the children in this process.
Home Page
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Weekly Recipes
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Your saved recipes
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Food box put together for you based on preferences
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Interactive cooking game
Recipe Page
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Detailed information about the recipe
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Ability to save the recipe to your favorites
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Nutrition facts of the meal
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Cooking game connected to the recipe
Food Box
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Progress bar to visualize the progression of the delivery process
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Summary of your food plan
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Delivery history
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Food box put together for you for this week
Cooking Game
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Cooking game to play along with the recipe
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Each game is based on weekly recipes
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Achievements for each finished step
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Progress bar that indicates where you are in the process
Logo design by Audra Walker | UI design by all group members.
Reflections
This was an enjoyable and exciting project to be a part of since it targets a critical issue that many people struggle with in today's society. Furthermore, this project challenges me to think from our users' perspectives when brainstorming ideas to help solve their needs. Therefore, the research part was extremely valuable since we gathered useful insight that has helped us in our direction.
I would like to see how we could further expand on this idea and find a way to design this app to benefit all people. For instance, to give the opportunity for people with disabilities or those who do not have access to a smartphone to also take advantage of the services that our app provides.
Furthermore, I am incredibly grateful for my team, and all the effort each of us put into this project. We all were equally passionate and engaged, which helped a lot considering the challenges we faced with zoom and working remotely. Therefore, we were able to find a way to adapt to this situation and communicate well with each other throughout working on this project. In addition, all team members brought unique perspectives and new skillsets to the team. Due to our team’s collaboration and the insights we gathered from all the single moms that had the courage to open up to us, I believe that our app proficiently accomplished the objective of this project.
Rough Sketches | Audra Walker
Sketches
Before designing our next prototype, we gathered some additional research and conducted a completive analysis to compared our concept with existing ones and see how they have tired to solve the problem.