The Challenge: Food Waste ♻️ Food Wealth
Redesign DFR’s web-based platform into a user-friendly mobile experience to streamline the food recovery process - making sure less food goes to waste.
What I Did: UX Research 🔍 | Visual Design 🎨
Assess the usability of DFR's current web-based product and simplify these insights into actionable design solutions.
Who it's For: Non-profit 🫶🏻 | Internship 🎓
Denver Food Rescue (DFR) combats food insecurity by recovering and redistributing healthy, perishable food throughout the greater Denver area.
How Long: Two Weeks 🗓️
The project was structured into two phases: one week for discovery and problem definition, followed by one week for design and testing.
Discover 💡
1. Preliminary System Usability Scale
Just as people need to understand their health to make informed improvements, digital products benefit from a similar approach.
To assess the “health” of our system, I began with a System Usability Scale (SUS), establishing usability benchmarks at the project’s start. This initial score revealed specific issues and opportunities for enhancement, guiding improvements through building a data-informed foundation.
2. Stakeholder Interviews
Since our team had limited knowledge of the food recovery landscape, I began by interviewing DFR stakeholders to understand their operational flow and key actors.
This led to the creation of a service blueprint, which provided our design team with a clear overview of interactions within DFR’s unique recovery process. The blueprint served as a foundational tool, clarifying how different actors and processes fit together, guiding us toward areas where design solutions could best support DFR’s mission.
3. Contextual Inquiry
Having established insight into the nature of DFR's recovery process, I then wanted to understand how volunteers utilized DFR’s web-app in real-time.
To do so, I observed eight food recovery volunteers—four new and four returning—during a shift. This approach allowed me to capture distinct needs and challenges unique to their experience with the current system.
Each difficulty encountered became a chance to ask targeted product opportunity questions, uncovering why these issues disrupted their experience and what design solutions they felt would have the greatest impact on their experience.
4. Competitive Analysis Workshop
I rounded out the discovery phase by leading a competitive analysis workshop focusing on two food recovery mobile products - 412 Food Rescue and Meal Connect - with the aim to:
🎯 Compare how other organizations approach food recovery.
🎯 Identify features that could enhance DFR’s unique food recovery process.
Define 📌
1. Affinity Mapping Insights
Drawing from the interviews I conducted throughout the contextual inquiry process, I gathered and mapped out volunteer responses, identifying four common themes. These themes aligned closely with the findings from the System Usability Scale, providing additional insights into key areas for improvement.
2. Solutions Brainstorming
To guide our solution decisions, we began by considering the following:
❔How might we improve app-learnability.
❔How might we enhance product efficiency.
❔How might we foster community amongst volunteers.
By leveraging our discovery data, we began to see some potential solutions for optimizing the overall user experience of DFR's product, such as:
💭 Announcement Boards: a platform for updates, questions, and celebrations could increase community engagement and retention.
💭 App On-boarding: providing guidance on how to use the app could improve learnability.
💭 Volunteer Profiles: personalized profiles for volunteers could help user engagement and satisfaction.
💭 Integrated Chat: providing direct communication between volunteers, donors, and DFR could improve recovery efficiency.
3. Defining Priority Solutions
After brainstorming design solutions, I facilitated a MoSCoW workshop with the design team to organize features and narrow our focus on three key solutions:
❗️Implementing an onboarding process: one that is contextually based, and personalized to individual roles to improve learnability and minimize errors.
❗️Adopting a centralized communication platform: with user-specific channels and notifications to enhance efficiency.
❗️Building an in-app community: utilizing industry conventions for social features (e.g. stories, posts, forums, etc.) to improve volunteer engagement and retention.
Design ✏️
1. User Flows
To develop user flows, I utilized the service blueprint created during the discovery phase as a starting point. Each user flow is comprised of distinct tasks DFR’s volunteers complete on a regular basis. Primary tasks include:
📋 User registration/onboarding
📋 Rescue sign-up
📋 Contacting support
Creating user flows allowed the design team and I to map out how each interaction could unfold, helping us pinpoint where our new solutions and features would be most effective in enhancing the overall user experience.
2. Sketches
We explored various designs through sketching, using quick iterations to visualize different approaches to the app’s functionality and user interface.
Ultimately, we chose the sketches that emphasized a minimalist design and operational efficiency. By focusing on clean layouts and streamlined workflows, the selected design solutions aimed to reduce cognitive load and enhance usability, ensuring the app met both functional requirements and user expectations.
3. Low-fidelity Design
The design team and I met with stakeholders and members of our user group to present a low-fidelity prototype. We wanted to gather targeted feedback on features, layouts, and user flows. Our feedback session highlighted two major design improvements:
🔧 Consolidate “Announcements”: both stakeholders and users agreed we could improve communication efficiency by integrating user announcements into "Volunteer Stories".
🔧 Relocate “Volunteer Stories”: both stakeholders and users suggested improving user familiarity by positioning volunteer stories in a more standard, industry-recognized location.
These insights were essential for streamlining the design to better meet stakeholder expectations and user needs, preparing us effectively for the next development phase.
Testing ✔︎
1. Moderated Usability Testing
Once our redesign was complete, I began testing our high-fidelity prototype. The goal was to observe how volunteers navigated the redesigned prototype and identify any usability issues. To ensure effective testing, I worked with the same two groups of new and returning volunteers. Each group was asked to complete the three most common tasks of food rescue volunteers:
📋 User registration/onboarding
📋 Rescue sign-up
📋 Contacting support
After the completion of their tasks, I deployed a final SUS test to measure the impact of changes and determine whether our user experience improvements were achieved.
Reflection 🪞
In the end, unfortunately stakeholders lost funding to implement our newly designed platform. Despite this setback, the process of designing and refining the system remains valuable, and will lay the groundwork for future opportunities when resources become available.
I strongly believe that a healthy system is essential for well balanced and effective design. Without a solid foundation, even the best solutions can fail to flourish. Whether it’s a mobile application or a local community nonprofit, investing time in understanding into improving systems can create lasting value, ensuring it can effectively support its community.
