To read or not read…the news

A year ago, I became an avid news reader when I decided to delete all my social media apps on my phone. In the beginning, it felt quite freeing. But, suddenly after a week or so, at this point I was craving to read and check updates about something, ANYTHING. Since I couldn’t see updates on what my friends and other people (I didn’t know) were doing anymore, I decided to check out what was going around the world. That’s when I decided to open the Apple News app for the first time since I bought my iPhone three years ago. Don’t get me wrong, I did read the news (…headlines), but only two or three times a week on my computer. But, now ever since I started using the app, I read the news (full stories!) every day. But, the constant influx of information and stories can be quite overwhelming.

As a frequent user of the Apple News app, I liked it for a whole year. It wasn’t amazing, but it got the job done, and I was too lazy to download a new app. But then suddenly, two months ago, it just became too much. Waking up every day and seeing those sad and negative headlines, it wasn’t the best way to start the day. Then, I decided not to check the news in the morning and do it around noon, but sometimes it would just ruin my lunch. Later, I changed it for the nighttime, and I couldn’t sleep because I felt like the world was going to end.

“Can’t news publishers write or post something more cheerful ?” — I thought to myself. I kept thinking that it was the publishers fault for giving us all these depressing headlines on the daily basis. But, then I realized, it was the app itself.

Challenge

The world and our country are going through some crazy times and it’s fair that the news publishers are covering all these stories. It’s not entirely their fault. But, as a user I know I can’t control what the Washington Post or the Guardian are publishing, but I think I should be able to control my own news reading experience.

Process

Goal

Redesign the app to solve current user pain points and improve their reading experiences.

App analysis

It was essential for me first to do an in-depth analysis of the app. I wanted to understand the different functionalities and the app’s overall architecture and navigation.

App audit

Here, I did an app audit to fully analyze and understand the app’s features and its usabilities. Throughout this process, I was able to identify some clear usability issues and pain points. Thus, in order to validate these observations, I needed to perform some user interviews and testings.

Empathize with Users

Interviews

A total of four interviews were conducted, where participants had to answer questions regarding their news consumption habits and what motivates or demotivates them from reading the news. Two of the participants are Apple News users, and the other two weren’t.

Needs and motivations

• All participants chose politics as one of their top news category to read.
• All participants stated that it’s harder nowadays to find reliable and unbiased new sources.
• 2 /4 participants said that they read the New York Times on the daily basis because they believe that their stories and sources are trustworthy.
• 4/4 participants said that they don’t comment on news articles mainly because they are scared about confrontation and that it’s harder to find a positive online spaces to express their thoughts and opinions without judgment.

Persona

Throughout the interviews, I noticed that even though users are indeed overwhelmed by what’s happening in the country and in the world, there’s no doubt that for them it is still important to stay aware and to read the news. Because of it, they are able to understand others’ point of views and opinions, which is essential for building a more open minded society.

Thus, with such insights, I was able to create a persona for the Apple News app.

Testings

By the end of each interview, I asked the participants to test the Apple News app. I wanted to observe their interactions and how they would personally use it. As a result I was able to identify key pain points and problems. (Note: two of my participants had use the app and other two haven’t)

Defining the Problem

After identifying and analyzing users’ pain points, I define the following common ones that most users were having trouble.

Pain Point #1: For You (Homepage)📱

The “For You” page is where users are supposed to get news recommendations based on their preferences. However, users were still unsatisfied with the suggestions, and it was hard for them to customize this page. Also, they had to scroll through the page to find a topic or a story that they wanted to read.

Every time I don’t want to receive a particular story on my feed anymore, the next few minutes the same type of story would appear, but from another publisher. It just feel like this page is not really “for me”.

Pain Point #2: Follow Your Favorites ❤️

This is part of the onboarding process, where users have to choose what they like in order to receive news suggestions based on their interests. However, during testings, some users skipped this step in which I asked them why?

It’s just a lot of work to scroll through this endless list to find all the interests and I topics I like. I just can’t be bothered by it.

Pain point # 3: More options 🤔

Non-Apple News app struggled with finding simple options such as saved, like, or share a story. Even current Apple News users recalled having a similar experience.

Trying to figure out how to save an article and realizing that I just had to swipe right on it to find that option, it made me felt inadequate to use the app.

Pain Point #4: Search 🔎

The search page was a place where the user would want to discover new topics and stories to read. But, the current layout makes this task a little more challenging.

When I go to the search page, I want to find new things to read. Since the homepage is so saturated with information, I tried to discover new things to read somewhere else. But, the search page always suggests sports topics, which is something I’m not into.

Pain Point #5: Notifications 🔔

Users received so many notifications, which it can be really tough for them to keep track of all the news updates they get every hour.

I want to have a place where I could go and see all my Apple News notifications without getting distracted by other notifications from other apps. I just want to catch up with my news peacefully.

Pain Point #6: Saved page 📰

One of the Apple News users had a ton of articles saved to read later. However, sometimes he will forget about them, and then he would want to read that one article that he saved, but he knew it was going to be a long scrolling journey for him.

Why there’s not a search bar on this page? I don’t want to scroll!

Pain Point #7 : Customize ✨

Testers expressed that they wanted to be able to have more customization options. They wanted to be able to change fonts or to choose a theme.

I’m a nighttime reader, so I would like to have a dark mode theme so it wouldn’t hurt my eyes.

Ideating Solutions

After defining the problem and analyzing each pain point. I was ready to come up with solutions.

Affinity Map

The affinity map helped me to brainstorm and come up with potential ideas to address and alleviate each of user pain points.

User Flow

Before I started sketching the wireframes, I created a user flow of how the newly redesigned features would connect with each other and how the users would navigate and use them.

Sketches

Once I had a good set of solutions that I wanted to explore more in depth with, I proceeded to sketch them out.

Based on my peer feedback, I decided to wireframe most of my sketches.

Prototype

Addressing Pain Point #1: For You (Homepage)

Proposed solutions

1. Navigations: By adding navigations for the channels and topics that the user follows, it helps the user to spend less time scrolling to find the topics or publishers that they want to read and spend more time reading the stories they want.
2. Browse: If the user wants to add more topics or channels to their feed, they can do it with the browse button in the top right corner.

Proposed solution

1. Dislike button: The current dislike button doesn’t let the users to specify why they dislike a particular article, which can hinder the story recommendations that the user will get in the future. Thus, by allowing users to tell the app what they didn’t like, it will help the app to recommend and filter stories that will fit the users’ actual preferences.

Proposed solution

1. Mute: During the interviews, couple participants stated that it will be less overwhelming to read the news if they were able to mute certain topics. But, that didn’t mean that they wanted to stop following the topic. They just wanted a break from it. Thus, this is why added a mute option where users can mute it for a certain time period or until they are ready to start receiving stories on their feed.

Addressing Pain Point #2: Follow Your Favorites

Proposed solutions

1. Add a search bar: For users that know what they want to read, they can quickly add those topics or channels straight to their favorites list.
2. Categories: Since my goal was to avoid users skipping this step, I wanted to make this interface as convenient as possible. Thus, I separate the news publishers and topics into two categories — channels and topics — for clearer navigation.

Addressing Pain Point #3: More options

Proposed solution

1. Instructions overlays: For new Apple News users, I included some instructions overlays to show them how to find certain features on the app. After one of the testers said that she felt inadequate when she was testing the app, I wanted to avoid these types of situations and guide the users during the onboarding process.

Addressing Pain Point #4: Search

Proposed solution

1. More discovery: The current search page, it does have a trending topics section for users to discover more topics to read. However, as one of the tester said: “It doesn’t look compelling.” Thus, for its redesign, I added a navigation section, where users can search through different types of categories and explore its trending topics. Lastly, I added some imagery to accompany the topics to make them visually appealing.

Addressing Pain Point #5: Notifications

Proposed solution

1. Activity page: Currently, when users get notifications, they typically see them on their locked screen or the notifications history. However, they are generally all clustered together, and it can be hard to keep track of all the updates received. Thus, by having a page on the app, where users can see their notifications, shared articles, and history, it will make the experience more efficient.

Addressing Pain Point #6: Saved

Proposed solutions

1. Search bar: By adding a search bar, users can find the specific saved articles that they want to read faster.
2. Organized by date: Adding this element to the interface, it can let the users know when they saved specific articles and also find an article by the date they saved them.

Addressing Pain Point #7: Customize

Proposed solutions

1. Font options: Besides from allowing users to increase the size of the fonts, users can also be able to change the types of fonts and its weight and color.
2. Themes: To expand the reading experience and make it more personal and customizable, I added a dark mode and sepia theme so the user can comfortably read the article in any environment.

Bonus ✨

By the end of designing the high fidelity screens, I kept thinking about what one of the tester was saying:

I would like to see how the weather is going to be like throughout the day without having to open another app.

Since the weather is another reason why people watch, listen, or read the news, I felt that it would be a nice detail to add a feature to the app and see what people have to say about it during the usability testings. Thus, if users click the icon next to the weather, they can see a full breakdown of the weather conditions and temperature of the day.

After creating all my high fidelity wireframes, I took them to Invision to create a prototype for my usability testings.

To test the prototype, clicked the link below 👇

Click here to view the project `Apple News `

Testings

I tested my app on six people between the ages of 23 to 35 years old.

In order to validate my app, I asked them to complete certain tasks on each of the features to test the redesigns performance and usability.

Successes

Pain Points

Recommendations

• Change the weather feature icon to make the function more obvious.
• Testers recommended replacing the font colors option to either a highlight feature or a keyword finder.
• Analyze and assess the shared activity page.
• Design and include a feature where users can manage and choose which publishers they want to receive updates.

Iterations

I analyze all my users’ recommendations and pain points in order to improve some of the features. Once I was done with the iterations, I conducted usability testings with other five participants to gather more feedback.

Weather Icon 🌧

On the previous redesigned version, I left the Apple News icon as it was since that’s how the current app looks like. However, since I decided to add the weather feature, I can see why it was confusing for users to click that previous icon to see the weather details.

Thus, I redesigned the icon and made it more clearer. I made three version of the button and…

5/5 users like the third screen because they could see the weather temperature and condition and they were also able to tell that it was a button.

Reading and notifications options 📖🛎

Finder: Based on peer feedback, I chose to change the font colors for a finder because users would be able to easily find specific keywords on the article.

Notifications: I added a new section on the notification settings in which users can update and manage their followed channels’ notification alerts. They easily choose which ones they want to receive updates.

Reflection

Redesigning this app and doing this case study reminded me that users are always the center of every design decision. It was amazing how little changes such as adding a search bar could create such a big usability impact.

Thanks for reading!

Apple News App — UX Redesign was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Glut: A UX/UI Case Study

Three weeks ago, I was browsing around Youtube, and I found a clip from “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” where he talks about food waste. I thought I was pretty much caught up with his show, but I haven’t seen this segment, so I gave it a go. The clip was from three years ago, but the issue is still current. He states that “a third of our food gets thrown away,” which makes America the number one country in the world that wastes the most food.

We are indeed blessed with an abundance of food, but still, there are a lot of people who don’t have access to food. This reality doesn’t make sense to me. This made me reflect on the way that I buy and consume food. I kept thinking of different solutions that I could implement in my life to control and manage it. Thus, after thinking about it for awhile, I thought this would be a great topic to explore and design something for it.

Why not?

Challenge

Food waste is already a big challenge by itself. But, I believed that the main one for this project is to raise users’ awareness about their own consumption of food and to see how much food they are wasting on a daily basis. If people are more self-aware about their actions, maybe this could help to mitigate the problem.

The United Nations estimates that one in nine people in the world do not have access to sufficient food to lead a healthy life. More people are reported to die from hunger every day than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. But at the same time, nearly one-third of the food that is produced in the world is lost or wasted due to one reason or the other.

Process and Timeline

Research

For this phase, I wanted to first learn more about the current food waste statistics and situation in the country, then having a better understanding of the issue, I proceeded with user interviews.

Secondary research

Most of these statistics and facts were gathered from online publications, reports, and studies.

Facts

• According to Dr. Roni Neff, a Johns Hopkins University researcher who led a first-ever study examining the nutrients we’re tossing in the trash, “if we were able to recover all of our wasted food, we could provide a 2,000-calorie diet to 84% of the population”
• If global food waste was a country, it would have the largest greenhouse gas footprint after U.S. and China. Food waste just in the U.S. is responsible for emissions equal to those 33 million cars.
• 25% of our nation’s fresh water goes into producing food that is never eaten.

Causes

• The demand for “perfect” fruit and vegetables means much is discarded, damaging the climate and leaving people hungry.
• Produce is lost in fields, warehouses, packaging, distribution, supermarkets, restaurants and fridges. Scarred vegetables regularly abandoned in the field to save the expense and labour involved in harvest. Or left to rot in a warehouse because of minor blemishes that do not necessarily affect freshness or quality.
• A study, published in the Journal of Nutrition and Dietetics, bases its data on 2012 U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, where 31% to 40% of our food is thrown away after it’s harvested. For each person that’s more than 1,200 calories per person per day.

“It’s all about blemish-free produce. What happens in our business today is that it is either perfect, or it gets rejected. says Jay Johnson, who ships fresh fruit and vegetables from North Carolina and central Florida.

Environmental Impact

According to FAO’s Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources, the carbon footprint of food produced and not eaten is estimated at 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases: making food wastage the third top GHG emitter after the U.S. and China.

Intiatives

In 2015, in alignment with UN Sustainable Development Goals, the EPA during the Obama administration announced the first domestic goal of reducing food loss and waste by 50% by the year 2030.

This showcases that America does want to reduce food waste. However, this isn’t an issue that the government can fix on their own, it needs the effort and participantion from all of us.

Competitive Analysis

• NoFoodWasted: It alerts users to food that has been discounted in around 150 supermarkets — available in Netherlands.
• Too Good to Go: It allows users to buy food that would otherwise go to waste from restaurants, bakeries, cafés and takeaways at discounted rates — available in Denmark, England, France, Germany, Norway and Switzerland
• Olio: It’s a food sharing app, where users post their items and arrange the pick up with the person sharing. — available worldwide (San Francisco is still in beta mode)
• Copia: It’s a a food recovery app, collects surplus food from companies and distributes it to organizations that serve people in need. — available only in the Bay Area.

All of these competitors have one common solution to food waste, which is to have more food on people’s plates instead of on the landfill. Thus, food sharing is an idea that I’ll be exploring for my project, as well as, getting people’s thoughts on it.

User Interviews

I target individuals mostly between the ages of 25 to 45 years old. The objective was to find out: What causes people to waste food?

Assumptions

Prior the interviews, I had some assumptions about users’ behaviors that might be contributing to their food waste.

• Social media: Because of the pressure of social media, people feel the need of taking the perfect picture of their meals. Thus, food have to be in a pristine condition, which leads to farmers throwing produce that are still good, but they just don’t look perfect.
• Unaware of their habits: People think that they don’t waste food as much as other people. This situation happens similarly to when we believe that we’re better drivers than everyone else on the road.
• “Best for” or “Sell by” labels: There’s not a general public understanding of the concept and usage of these labels on food products. Thus, some people believe that if items are passed this date; therefore, it will be dangerous to consume.

Questions

I started the interviews with some warm up question such as asking the participants about their day and their daily routines. Then I proceeded with questions to find out users’ grocery shopping habits and food consumption.

1. What does a typical grocery trip looks like?
2. How many times a week do you go to the grocery store?
3. How do you usually plan for your grocery trip?

Synthesis (Building Empathy)

A total of five interviews were conducted in which two of the participants had kids, and the other three participants didn’t. They all live in big cities, where access to groceries is relatively easy.

Needs

• Ability to better plan their meals and grocery trips: This was a crucial need especially for those participants who had kids since they have a stricter time constraint when it comes to going to the grocery store and getting all the things their family need.
• Plan healthy and tasty meals without spending too much time: Participants wants to be able to find and cook new recipes; however, due to their busy lives they are unable to plan their meals efficiently.
• Affordable and high-quality products: All participants chose Trader Joe’s as their go-to store because of their relatively large and great selection of products and produce, as well as, their reasonable pricing.
• Users express the need to learn more about food waste, how supermarkets deal with this issue, and what they can do to help the problem: All participants personally didn’t know or have ever wondered what the grocery stores did with the produce and food that they couldn’t or didn’t sell.

Pain Points

Through the interviews, I was able to identify some key users’ pain points. I included quotes directly from the participants to showcase what happens in these specific situations.

1. Constantly forget to make a grocery list or doesn’t have time to make one.

“We have a board on our fridge, where we just write what we need throughout and we take a picture of it and use it as our list.”

“I would love to make lists before going to the store because my husband and I would always forget to buy that one key ingredient for a recipe.”

2. Dietary restrictions can be hard to deal with when it comes to meal planning

“My husband can’t eat carbs, and I can’t overeat gluten, so sometimes meal planning can be challenging.”

3. Often forgets about what they would have in their kitchen and things would get spoiled or rotten

“Sometimes when I buy avocados that are still unripe, I would let them sit on the counter to ripe. But often, I would forget about them, and they would end up rotting. It’s very frustrating and sad when that happens.”

4. Buy products or food that they dislike and having to throw them away or let them sit on the pantry till it expires

“I bought this bag of cookies for my husband and me, but they tasted so bad that we had to throw them away. We felt pretty bad about it, but there was no way that anyone would like these.”

5. Too embarrassed to give food that they don’t need to their neighbors or friends or doesn’t know where to donate their unwanted food

“I have couple things in my kitchen right now that I know nobody in the family would eat them, but I’m too embarrassed to go to my neighbors’ house and ask them if they want the items. So, I think I’ll have to throw them away because I don’t know who else to give it.”

Persona

After reading and understanding users’ grocery experiences and journeys, I create two personas: a primary and a secondary persona. By having these two personas, it helped to create a product that would work for individuals, who pretty much make grocery decisions for themselves and for those individuals who have to revolve decisions around others’ preferences and needs.

Primary persona — Jenn

Secondary persona — Lucy

Defining the Problem

1. People need to learn how to manage their grocery shopping habits better, so they don’t end up buying more food than they need.
2. Meal planning should be a straightforward process, where people don’t have to feel overwhelmed by it.
3. People sometimes forget about food that they bought and the items would only sit there and expired or rot.
4. Food waste should be an issue that could be prevent it because once the food gets rotten, it’s too late to fix the problem.

Designing Solutions

1. 🍜 Recipe finder: Help users to discover and find recipes that they or their family would love. Also, make the meal planning experience even more comfortable by allowing users to add recipe’s ingredients directly to their grocery list.
2. 📝 Grocery list: Users should be able to quickly create and manage their grocery lists and also check their previous history of lists that they have created for quicker references.
3. 📈 Inventory tracker: This tool could be handy when it comes to keeping track and managing what users bought and what they have in their kitchen without having to waste food merely because they forgot about them.
4. 🙋 Sharing food: During the competitive analysis, I felt inspired by how other countries are tackling food waste by creating products, where people can share among each food that they no longer need instead of throwing it away. So for this app, I wanted users to be able to have a similar platform and community, where they would feel comfortable sharing it.

UI Design

The product should feel friendly, approachable, and reliable.

Name

I wanted the app’s name to be short and meaningful. After couple searches for a word on the English dictionary, three failed attempts on the random word generator site, and the hopes of finding a word in a foreign language on Google Translate, I finally found it.

Glut — “an excessively abundant supply of something.”

I immediately felt it would the right name for the app. If there weren’t an excess of food waste, I wouldn’t be doing creating this product in the first place.

Logo

For the logo, I wanted to design something simple, but quirky. Thus, after some quick drawings on paper and playing around on Sketch, I created the logo.

I took the “g” designed from the first round and added a dot on top of it, and that created a smiley face 🙂. At first, I thought it was silly. But the more I kept staring at it, the more it grew on me, and it made me smile too. So, I hoped that it would do the same for users as well.

Style Tile

Before designing the high fidelity wireframes, I create a style tile so I could get a better sense of the UI direction that I will be using for my prototype. I chose yellow as one of my primary colors because it represents freshness and happiness and it’s a color often associated with food.

Architecture

Sitemap

Using the solutions from my brainstorming session, I created a sitemap, where I arranged and organized the features and overall navigation.

User Flow

Then, in this user flow, I depicted a series of interactions that users would go through in different scenarios and how they would navigate through it.

Wireframes

Started the wireframe process with some quick sketches to establish the overall the layout and content flow.

Overall, the app’s layout will be minimal and straightforward because I want to provide users a seamless and easy experience.

Prototype

Once I finally felt ready to create the hi-fi wireframes of my proposed solutions, I took my previous sketches and mid-fidelity wireframes to develop hi-fi wireframes for my prototype.

Grocery List

Pain point: Users often forget or don’t have time to create a grocery list in which can make their grocery trips less efficient.

Solutions:

1. Allow users to quickly create lists, where the inserted items would be automatically categorized for a more comfortable shopping experience.
2. Ability to view past lists and retrieve them to use them again for another grocery trip or add it to an existent list.
3. Add contributors to a grocery list, so other users can to add or check off items out of the list.
4. Keep track of the total cost of each grocery trip by giving users the option of inserting the price of the items on their grocery lists. This type of information will be useful for future trips so they can keep track of their expenses.

Recipe Lists

Pain point: Users find meal planning a quite overwhelming task especially if they have specific dietary issues or food preferences.

Solutions:

1. Provide a platform where users can search and discover recipes uploaded by other users or by Glut.
2. Users also have the option of making their recipes private if they wished not to share it with other users publicly.
3. Users can directly add and save a recipe’s ingredients straight to their grocery list without having to copy and paste into a list.
4. Users have the choice of adding their recipes either manually or with a website link where they found a recipe that they would like to add to it to their account.

Inventory

Pain point: Users often will forget about the items that they would buy and food would sit in their kitchen for too long till the stage, where the product has expired or rotten.

Solutions:

1. Users can keep track of what they have in their fridge, pantry, and freezer. They can see what items are about to expire soon, food that they might be running low, and their most consume items.
2. Users would be able to get notifications too! Every time an item is about to run out or expired, users can immediately add the product to the grocery list or post it on Sharings.
3. If users don’t want to add the product’s details manually, they also have the option to add the item with a barcode.
4. On each item’s page, users can check the purchasing history, have the options of posting it on sharings or add it to a grocery list, learn more about to store the item for longer shelve life, and view potential recipes use that type of ingredient.

Sharings

Pain point: Usually users will buy more food than they need, which meant that the might not be able to eat it all or there are occasions, where they purchased new types of food that they later found it that they didn’t like them. On either situation, users would have to deal with the sense of guilt of wasting and throwing away food.

Solutions:

1. Create a community and a platform where users would feel comfortable about posting, sharing, and getting unwanted food with people living nearby them or from their circle of friends.
2. On each item’s listing, users can read a description of it, view the owner’s profile and reviews, check the pickup dates, and report any issue related to the listing.
3. If users are interested in a product, they can request the item, send a message, and wait for the request to be accepted by the other user. Once the request has been confirmed, both parties can set up the pickup location and time.

Home

For the homepage, I wanted to offer users a quick view or a summary of what’s happening on the other features without having the users to go to each feature’s tab and dig deeper. Every time they open the app, they would be greeted with new recommendations, recipes, or nearby listings.

Proposed solutions

1. For the recipes section on the home screen, users will get be getting recommended recipes based on their searches and preferences. The recipes will be also constantly changing based on time of the day.
2. For the inventory section, users can see what items they are running low and add those items to their grocery list. They can also look at the food that is about to expired soon too.
3. For the sharing section, users can view and check listings that are near them.
4. If users want to add a list, a sharing, a recipe, or a product for their inventory they can add it straight from the home screen without having to go to each feature’s page.

Other features

• Users can view all current and past alerts on their notifications sidebar.
• User’s progress page is where they can keep track of how much food they consumed and how much money they have saved, and how much food has expired. They can also view how their efforts have made an impact on the environment, which can help users feel that their efforts are impactful too.
• Community’s progress page showcases the overall efforts of your neighborhood and everyone on Glut. This page hopefully shows users that fighting against food waste is a collective effort, and everyone’s actions count!

Prototype

Once the screens were finished, it’s was time for my favorite part — putting it all together and for that I used Marvel.

Feel free to interact and play around with it 😬.

Testings

A total of five testings were conducted, where users had to perform a series of tasks and scenarios.
The overall objectives were to observe how seamless participants’ interactions with the app would be and to see if any of these features would solve any of their food related pain points.

Findings

All the participants were able to complete all the tasks, but there were some occasions where they struggled, and it was mainly due to some button placement issues.

However, other than all participants stated that the features felt very intuitive and familiar to use. But, throughout the testings, I was also able to gather some very interesting insights.

Insights

• 1 of the participants said that she wouldn’t personally use the sharing feature because she wouldn’t trust her neighbors and people in the city (New York) wouldn’t be very open to idea of getting food from strangers.
• All participants stated that they would use the inventory feature the most because they have gone through experiences similar to the pain point that this feature was based on.

Pain Points

• Even though, all participants liked the idea of the Sharings feature, most of them did express concern about its safety.

Recommendations

• 2 participants stated that having a user verification system and the process would be a great solution to make food sharing a little bit safer.
• 2 participants recommended adding an option where users would be able to donate their food to the food banks or another type of donation centers.
• 3 participant suggested the ability to get alerts when grocery stores have markdown produce or food. This way if people could buy food and save money, stores wouldn’t have to throw away them away.

Landing Page

Before I wrapped up this first phase of the project, I wanted to create a simple landing page of how the app would be promoted on a website.

Next Steps 💃

• Iterations: Fix some of the prototype interaction issues highlighted by users during the testing.
• Sharing: Research, brainstorm, and ideate solutions to make the Sharing feature more reliable and safer for users.
• Food donations: Look into local food banks and donation centers and research about their requirements and process for food donations. This information would be used to prototype a feature on the app, where users can easily donate their food items.
• Supermarket markdowns: Visit more local grocery stores and farmers’ market to understand how they operate. — At the beginning of my research process, I went to visit my local Trader Joe’s, and I asked them about what they did with the food they couldn’t sell and they said that they donated it every night to nearby shelters. Thus, I’ll keep gathering more information to test whether or not implementing a markdown alert feature would be useful and necessary.

Reflection

After two weeks of thinking, designing, reading, and having nightmares about food waste, it for sure made me even more aware and conscious about my own food consumption and waste habits. What amazed me about doing this project is that it doesn’t take that much to reduce your own food waste. I even recently started making lists and regularly checking my fridge and pantry to make sure I didn’t have food that is about to expire.

It’s all about managing and paying attention. But, everyone’s lifestyles are different, which is why I designed a series of features for Glut in the hopes of having at least one feature that would resonate with users and that it would work for them.

— Thank you for reading!

Feel free to leave comments or suggestions :)