In collaboration with Smart Gjøvik and Bekk, my team and I explored the topic of food waste and how we could reduce food waste through a digital planning tool.
Even though people agree that food waste is negative, a considerable amount of food gets wasted every year. Research shows that difficulty related to planning and organization of food is a huge pitfall, especially in households.
Hamle aims to reduce food waste by making planning and organization easier for households. Grocery shopping becomes more organized by allowing multiple users access to the same shopping list that is updated in real-time. Items will then be added to a digital pantry for a quick and easy overview over all the household’s groceries.
I worked as the interaction designer in a team together with two web developers during the spring semester in 2022. I was responsible for guiding the web developers through the design process while having overall responsibility for insight, ideation and UI/UX.
Food waste occurs in every part of the supply chain, from the farm fields to the dinner plate. It is a complex problem with many underlying factors, dire consequences and no right solution. Gjøvik municipality, specifically Smart Gjøvik, wants to reduce food waste, one way or another.
Food waste reduction was a fairly new endeavor for Smart Gjøvik, therefore they did not have any set direction or target audiences.
Since this project acted as a bachelor thesis for two fields: interaction design and web development, the solution had to be digital and something that would require web development. This also meant that the design process had to be finished in a timely manner to ensure time for development and thesis writing.
Since reduction of food waste would be a result of our proposed solution, it was very important for us to understand and figure out the different avenues where food waste occurs to uncover hidden opportunities. In the Norwegian government’s “Bransjeavtalen om reduksjon av matsvinn: Hovedrapport 2020” it is reported that the most food waste occurs in households.
To gather more insight about food waste, we sent out a survey through platforms such as Facebook and discord. The aim of the survey was to map out attitudes regarding food waste, household size, food expenses, shopping habits and which food or planning related apps they used. The survey received a total of 580 responses and gave the team an insight into different demographics’s attitudes and habits that might lead to food waste, but it lacked depth.
To better understand challenges related to food waste on a deeper level, I conducted 4 semi-structured interviews with people with different household compositions over Microsoft teams. In the interviews it was important for us to not only ask about the interviewee’s own actions and thoughts, but also look into possible contributing factors; These included attitudes regarding food in their childhood and other family members' habits and actions.
Some people are bad at eating their leftovers, while others overestimate the amount of food they need. In addition to leftovers, greens and uneaten cold cuts are the things that people throw away the most.
When in doubt, people would rather buy groceries to have "just in case" rather than to make another grocery trip.
Majority of people answered that they use a shopping list, but the list looks different for everyone. Some use different apps on their phone, while others prefer a physical list. One interviewee have a whiteboard that they take a picture of before going shopping.
Majority of people considered food waste bad, but there was a wide range of different emotions tied to the thought of throwing food away. On one end, people expressed feelings of anger and getting upset. While others felt indifferent and paid little to no thoughts to the action.
We gathered all the insights and condensed them into three personas to help us with ideation. Each team member was given a couple of How-might-we-questions that they could brainstorm around.
After our brainstorm, we held a dot voting session where each member got three votes for every HMW-question and voted on the ideas they deemed most feasible. The most popular ideas were then sorted again using a priority matrix.
After some deliberation among the team regarding technical feasibility, we decided to make a mobile MVP with the following features:
Households come in many different forms and sizes. We wanted to make it easier to plan for individuals and bigger groups.
It is hard to plan when you can't remember what you have. In Hamle users can choose which items from the grocery list they want to add to an inventory. This makes it easy for users to get an overview over what they have.
With an overview over group members likes and dislikes it will be easier to plan together and surprise your favorite person with their favorite snacks.
In order to prevent feature creep, we created a flow chart with the minimum viable functionality that we wanted include in the app. This ensured that we had an overview over what wireframes and development was required in the first iteration.
After we knew what we wanted to create and user tested our lo-fi wireframes, the developers started on the backend and I started on fleshing out the design. Due to frequent meetings and close cooperation I was able to design for development and kept technical difficulties and constraints in mind.
Based on various feedback from the team, peers and user testing, I made several improvements to the UI.
Based on feedback from user tests, we discovered that the testers were unsure about the functionality of the basket and the utility of categories. UI elements were also made bigger for a better experience.
In previous iterations each item in the inventory was divided up in different food categories. To give users a better overview, items are now divided up in different storage categories. Quantity of each item was also added.
While more precise login error messages are more helpful for the user, it also poses a security risks. Therefore we opted for a more general error message.
At the end of the project we sent out a progressive web app (PWA) out to 8 participants. Due to time constraints the pilot only lasted a week. The feedback from the testers were similar in that it was too short amount of time to tell if it helped with food waste or having a better overview over groceries. Nonetheless, the testers thought that shared grocery list and inventory were useful features.
if we were to continue working on Hamle I would do a bigger and longer pilot test in order to get feedback on what works, what does not and what we could do better. At the same time I would like to conduct more research in order to understand the target audience better and uncover more opportunities. In this iteration we relied on surveys and interviews, but I think observations and diaries could be beneficial to get a better insight into how much food is actually wasted vs how much food people say they waste. This would also give us a more solid starting point when it comes to measuring impact.
