USER RESEARCH & UX/UI DESIGN - CONCEPT PROJECT
Incentivizing Food Sustainability for CUESA
The Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA) is a non-profit organization known for its farmers markets in the San Francisco Bay Area. They are dedicated to growing thriving communities through the power and joy of local food. Food waste has been a rising issue in the U.S., as almost 40% of the country’s food ends up in landfills and contributes to greenhouse gases. My team’s goal was to help CUESA reduce food waste by incentivizing the public to purchase items at the farmers market and informing them of ways to adopt sustainable habits.
CLIENT: CUESA* TARGET USER: The sustainable shopper DURATION: 2-week sprint
*Note: This was a concept project and was not sponsored by CUESA
Methods
Heuristic Evaluation, Contextual Inquiry, Competitive/Comparative Analysis, Surveys, Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Journey Mapping, Sketching, Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Branding
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Flat Icon, Lucid Chart, AirTable, MURAL, Google Suite, Zoom, paper & pen
THE CHALLENGE
People are interested in taking action against food waste, they just don’t know how
Although CUESA’s mission involves cultivating a healthy food system, people weren’t aware of sustainable ways to take action. CUESA wanted to find a solution that encourages shoppers to make informed decisions that help reduce food waste.
THE SOLUTION
Incentivize users to make informed purchasing decisions while increasing revenue
We believe that by designing a mobile application that will encourage users to shop at the farmers market, assist in making informed purchasing decisions, and provide information on proper food storage and disposal, we will reduce the amount of food waste that users and vendors create, and promote more sustainable habits.
Understanding CUESA’s impact in the online community
Beginning our research process, we first aimed to understand how users were obtaining information about food waste through CUESA. After performing a heuristic evaluation, or usability inspection, of their website, we found that this information was buried under a series of tabs. We suspected this might be a problem, so we validated these issues with a task analysis.
Key Takeaways from Task Analysis
Users were not aware of CUESA’s efforts to reduce food waste since it was not visible on their homepage. Instead, it was located under two layers of navigation and users had to know where to look to find it.
Misleading article titles made it difficult for users to find specific information about sustainability.
A pivot point: Witnessing CUESA’s impact in person
Beyond the computer screen and into downtown San Francisco, I visited their Saturday Ferry Plaza Farmers Market to see how visitors were currently interacting with our client’s business first-hand. Up until this point we had a different idea of the customer’s journey, so these observations really helped us see the big picture.
During my visit, I learned that:
There have been fewer customers since COVID, which has affected how much farmers can sell every day and how much they can grow.
CUESA offers a physical reward card for returning customers, but customers are hesitant about close contact when getting their card checked.
Compost bins are present at each waste station. Customers were attentive to putting food waste in the proper bin.
These takeaways led us to believe that customers are receptive to learning about additional ways they can help support CUESA in their mission to reduce food waste.
A key player in sustainable grocery shopping
It was evident that CUESA’s markets make a positive impact on the San Franciscan community, but how do farmers markets in general fit into the big picture of food waste? It turns out that farmers markets allow for more sustainable food distribution, based on these factors:
Buying Local = Less Waste
Due to shorter distribution chains, less food is wasted if produce is purchased from local farmers. Local farmers don't produce excessive amounts of food compared to conventional grocery stores.
Organic Practices = Less Pollution
Many farmers use certified organic practices, which minimize the amount of pesticides that end up in our water and soil.
Fewer Factories = Less Packaging
Compared to conventional stores that package most items in plastic containers, farmers markets use less packaging since many foods don’t go through a packing factory. Visitors also tend to bring reusable bags.
Additionally, studies show that as much as 90% of Americans could be fed with food grown within 100 miles of their home.
These facts brought the importance of supporting farmers markets to light and helped us understand what the true culprit of food waste might be.
Getting to know the user
After observing shoppers at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, our next goal was to understand people’s motivations and challenges regarding purchasing groceries and awareness of food waste. We first conducted 2 surveys, which allowed us to see areas of opportunity that we could investigate further. According to our surveys:
When grocery shopping, people tend to make purchasing decisions based on:
What’s in season
Price
Unique finds
The most common challenges people encounter when consuming all of the food they buy are:
Food spoiling too fast
Buying too much food to begin with
Not having enough time to cook
When shopping at farmers markets, people tend to have issues with:
Prices of the items
Not having enough choices
Limited marketing navigation
We then conducted interviews to learn more about particular challenges and organized these findings in an affinity map to visualize patterns within the data.
Our key user insights were:
People are willing to take steps in reducing food waste, but they’re not sure how.
They enjoy keeping a standard shopping routine at their local markets.
They tend to make purchasing decisions based on what’s in season, price, and unique finds.
Narrowing down our focus on the target user
Using these insights, we solidified our target user, Leah, the sustainable shopper.
Behaviors:
Environmentally-conscious
Shops at the local farmers market
Enjoys spending time in nature
Needs & Goals:
Learn more about how to make sustainable choices
Reduce her household’s food waste
Buy fresh produce that’s in season and at a good price
Frustrations:
Not sure if her efforts have a meaningful impact
Keeping track of the best food options to buy
Seeing food being wasted by corporations
Finding points of opportunity within the user’s journey
In order to build empathy for our user, we simulated a specific shopping experience and created a journey map of Leah’s thoughts and emotions:
Taking a look at the lowest dip in their emotional rollercoaster, we were able to identify that the user experiences the most dissatisfaction when they’ve noticed their food has gone bad and needs to be thrown away. This prompted us to think about how the wasted food could be stopped at the source, when they’re determining which and how much food to buy.
A symbiotic solution
Once we had defined the needs of our client and the user, common similarities gave clarity to how we could offer a symbiotic solution:
This led us to brainstorm potential design solutions that could:
Incentivize shopping at CUESA’s farmers markets
Assist users in making informed purchasing decisions
Educate users about sustainable food habits
Inform shoppers of our product via signage
Putting pen to paper, we brought concepts to life
Our design phase began with a rapid ideation activity called “Design Studio”, in which we quickly sketched out and explored different options with members of different teams.
When considering solutions, we drew inspiration from apps that incentivized sustainable shopping and weighed possible features, including collective shopping lists, seasonality charts, meal planners, and food storage assistants.
When considering devices, these reasons led us to design for mobile:
User needs to access information on the go
Push notifications would be essential for maintaining habits
Geo-location functions could be enabled
How might we create a solution unique to CUESA?
Revisiting our research, we were inspired to find a solution that could be specifically tailored to CUESA. Taking into account their existing manually-operated rewards program, we thought: “How might we leverage this program to boost users’ interest in shopping at the market and educating themselves about food waste?”
This set us off along the trajectory that would lead us to create the Seasonal Shopper app, which provides CUESA’s users with the tools and resources they need to make the most of their farmer’s market experience.
Here’s how it works:
By providing visitors with an automated digital reward system, we can help eliminate the stresses that are associated with a manual reward system, such as visitors misplacing their physical card and requiring visitors to stop by the CUESA booth during COVID. Additionally, a digital solution allows for CUESA to share other relevant information in a place where they already have the visitor’s attention.
Leveling up the shopping experience
While designing, we considered how this information could be structured in order to create an engaging experience. Key design decisions revolved around these three features:
Our solution
This prototype sequence follows the scenario of our target user using the Seasonal Shopper app to find weekly picks at her local farmers market and find more information about how to reduce food waste:
Putting it to the test
In order to ensure that our mobile app solution meets the needs of the users, we conducted usability tests with five people who closely match the profile of our sustainable shopper. They were asked to complete five tasks that would occur during their shopping experience. From our results, we noted the most common feedback and made these iterations:
Reformatting the Farmer detail page:
Removed the toggle menu option from the top navigation
Condensed information onto one screen
Improved the market map fidelity
Added a visual cue to indicate where the user was within the bottom navigation
Improved gamification elements:
Added a countdown timer that references a stopwatch to give a clear visual representation of time left to shop
Adjusted basket icons so that they corresponded with the gold star signs that would be featured in the market
Developing the look & feel
While increasing the fidelity of our prototype, we referenced CUESA’s website to inform our UI decisions. Our goal was to adhere to CUESA’s brand as much as possible while adding a modern flair.
Colors
were derived from CUESA’s logo and primary areas of their website. We intentionally toned down certain colors within the illustrations to give a more natural feel and allow for important symbols to “pop”.
Fonts & Typefaces
were selected from CUESA’s website in order to maintain consistency between their website and the Seasonal Shopper mobile app.
Illustrations
shown throughout our onboarding sequence and Home screen were inspired by marketing assets on their website. We chose to feature these more prevalently across our app in order to add to the gamified experience.
Skeuomorphism
or the concept of representing items to resemble their real-world counterparts, was leveraged when designing the My Card screens of our app. Our app’s digital card was intended to function like CUESA’s current Seasonal Shopper card, while also providing more details about the program.
What’s next on the horizon?
My next steps in design iteration include:
Adding a “shopping history” feature in to keep track of the foods bought
Recipe recommendations for bought foods
Adding push notifications for new foods in the market
Adding the ability to share foods, events and articles with friends
Implementing a “seller” functionality, which would allow farmers to create their own profile for updating live product inventory and hosting flash sales
How we could implement Seasonal Shopper into CUESA’s farmers markets
Although we successfully tested our app with target users, we were not able to test integration within the physical market environment. These steps would include:
Gathering data from farmers about their interest in participating
Pitching the idea to CUESA
Beta testing the app with 10-20 booths at the market, using branded signage to advertise the application, shown below:
Results & reflections
This concept project introduced many unpredictable variables into the UX arena that required an extra level of consideration. It required us to not only understand the online behavior of our target user, but also the entire physical interaction of our users with the farmers, market and food industry. By taking a step back and looking at the big picture of food waste as a whole, we were able to see where the most prominent issues arose, and this allowed us to target the problem at the source.
My team and I really enjoyed researching alternative ways we could get users engaged and am proud of our unique solution! We had a fun time bouncing ideas between one another, which led to a more dynamic solution than if we were designing by ourselves. I was excited to utilize my visual design background in designing the UI, but this project also pushed me out of my comfort zone with interviewing users in-person at the market and allowed me to develop other aspects of my “T-shaped” skillset.
Although food waste will be an issue for some time, I hope this brings us one step closer to achieving a more conscious mindset about doing our part to help.