FreshTrack Expiration Tracker
Table of Contents
1. Define
2. Analyze
3. Design
4. Deliver
5. Reflect
Scope: A mobile application tracking expiration dates
Timeline: 4 weeks
The Team: Myself and 2 other UX Designers
My Role: UX Design/research, UI Design
Tools Used: Figma, Maze, Slack, Trelllo
Problem Statement
Food waste at the household level is a significant global challenge, with a substantial environmental impact. According to recent studies, between 30-40% of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted each year. FreshTrack seeks to solve this critical issue by providing a user-friendly, practical, and effective tool to help users manage their food inventory, plan meals efficiently, and minimize unnecessary waste.
Defining the Problem
Competitive Analysis
In order to understand the needs of our users, my team and I needed to look at key competitors in the market, to gauge how other products are solving the same problem. We found three apps that have similar capabilities- Fridgly, Cooklist, and Pantry Chef, and conducted a feature inventory to identify commonalities. This way, we can see which features our users expect to have, and additional features we can add to effectively compete against the others.
Key Takeaways
Lack of Donation Options
No Educational Content
Inaccurate Expiration Database
User Interviews
To properly understand the needs of the audience that will use this app, we conducted user interviews via Zoom with six users who frequently do their own grocery shopping/cooking to understand how they plan out their grocery trips, decide what and how much to buy, and how they prevent food waste in their home.
Key Takeaways
These interviews made it apparent that users struggle to create a system that allows them to properly plan out how they’re using the groceries in their home effectively, which leads to wasted food, time, and money.
We’ve determined that users are struggling in these areas the most:
Using groceries before they expire
Creating an effective waste management system in their household
Support with tracking purchased items
Analyzing the Data
After conducting research into current products in the market and gathering user feedback, We created three How Might We statements to define our objectives:
How Might We encourage users to regularly track their inventory?
How Might We help users plan their meals?
How Might We streamline the experience to support repeat users?
Designing Solutions
User Flows
We designed a user flow based on the main capability of this application: Scanning and uploading groceries into the app, and viewing expiration dates. This flow shows the happy path that the user would take to complete that task:
Sketches
Below are the preliminary sketches to align on the basic structure of the pages. Our focus was to insure pages were easy to navigate, and the user always understood exactly where they are in the process
Sitemap
We created a site map to align on the main structure and navigation of the app. This was ran through a tree test with 10 users, where we uncovered that some of the language was unintuitive. This is the updated site map: