WASTENOT: An app designed to help you reduce your food waste
By: Kirsty A Armstrong
Tags: UX Design, Bootcamp, Ironhack, UI Design, Food Waste

“Food waste is responsible for 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions”- Hannah Ritchie- Senior Researcher at University of Oxford

For this 2 week project, we were asked to develop a tracking app. As a concerned global citizen I wanted to focus on something that could apply to the masses and potentially have a large scale environmental impact. I chose to focus on domestic food waste and set about conducting some research.

Research:

So first things first, what are people wasting? How much are they wasting? Is there even be a need for an app like this and how should it go about tackling this very complex issue? As you can see I needed to gather a lot of data, so I created a survey and went from there.

The survey findings reinforce how important a topic this is with 57.1 % saying they were extremely bothered by food waste. So great start! It also provided some invaluable insight into the user’s motivations and behaviour. The majority of survey takers said that they were throwing away vegetables and cooked leftovers. The main reasons for this were that the food went off before they expected it to, or that they had simply forgotten about it.

One of the main insights from the survey was that 45.5% said that they threw out very little. However, 71% of those who already take steps to reduce their food waste said that they would use an app designed to help them further reduce. This raised a bit of a flag, were people downplaying how much food they threw out? Similar to when you say you go to the gym 3 times a week but the last time that happened was 2005?

The next step was to conduct interviews, in which I focused more on shopping habits to see if that had an impact on food waste habits. It also gave me a chance to ask some more questions about how much food was being wasted by those who claimed to only throw out very little. Once I managed to get the interviewees to open up a bit, it was revealed that sometimes they could be quite wasteful. There are always occasions where life gets busy and things get forgotten about.

The interviews also gave me the opportunity to inquire into recipe needs and overall interest in suggestions or a meal plan. This side was a bit more mixed, meaning the focus for the MVP should be on the tracking of the products with some recipe suggestion. A main theme which recurred was that the process of adding items should be simple and intuitive, nobody has time to spend ages unpacking their groceries and recording every little detail.

Another thing that I noted within my Affinity diagram, was that the impact that the freezer had for food waste. Given that some people only have tiny freezers or none at all; any food waste reducing suggestions or recipe suggestions should be able to be filtered by how food is being stored. Logically I believe this should be part of the setup process.

The final part of the research was the competitive analysis, to pinpoint where the app should fall in the market. The competitor apps available for android were Fridgefeed, Food Checklist and Best Before. Then the three main apps that I found for iOS were Fridge Pal, Fridgely and Cozzo.

The majority allowed you to share shopping lists and items that you had with another member of your household. All had the option to scan items by their barcode or to manually upload them. Only Fridgely had the shopping receipt scanner. I also found that those which gave a predetermined expiry date didn’t do so by the specific item. They were all given a standard (typically 30 days) as opposed to adjusting based on the type of item. Obviously, an open carton of milk, won’t last the same in your fridge as a potato will in your cupboard.

The other main gap in the market that I saw was the lack of data visualization based on the item. While some apps had graphs showing food waste from week to week, my research showed that it would be more beneficial to show users what types of food they were wasting. If they saw that they were wasting 20 % of all yoghurt that they buy then this shows them a tangible buying habit that they can change.