What do people want?

We began our process by conducting general interviews with people interested in food waste or environmentalism to gauge their views on the topic and opinions of any food waste apps they may already use. From our data, we compiled two personas that we would focus on.

Our primary persona is that of someone who doesn’t know much about food waste, but wants to know more. They are also interested in finding ways to fight food waste since they don’t know where to start, and want to save money at the same time. Our secondary persona is someone who is much more involved in tackling this issue already. They already know some ways to reduce their food waste output, but are looking to learn more, as well as help other people around them do the same. 

Breaking out the sketchpad

Next, we started sketching out ideas of our redesign. At this point we had not set on a specific direction yet, so we played around with several ideas including adding more restaurant details and contact information, introducing a price filter, and adding educational facts. We also created several storyboards of possible scenarios in which someone might use Too Good To Go. These ranged from supporting local businesses to grabbing a cheap meal and helped us imagine what our users would want out of the app.

Our redesign plan

We eventually narrowed down our scope and decided to focus on improving the educational aspect of the app using “fun facts” during the sign-up process to educate users, as well as on the restaurant pages and order confirmation page to reinforce the learning. We also decided to add user badges to maintain continued use. We believed that these extensions fit our personas and our goal of expanding environmental awareness the best out of all the options we had considered.

Next, we worked on creating a low fidelity prototype of our redesign.

Iterate, iterate, iterate

After user testing this prototype on some of our peers, we received valuable feedback and made some changes based on recommendations we received. Many users skipped past the fun facts completely or didn’t pay attention to them because they wanted the sign-up process to be quicker. However, when later asked to examine the facts, users overall enjoyed them and learned something new. As a result, we moved the educational facts to the end of the sign-up process (as you can see in the lo-fi prototype above).

Making it look pretty

Using our lo-fi prototype and the style guide, we created a high fidelity prototype.

You can never have enough user testing

Once again, we did user testing, this time on the same individuals from the first general interview that we conducted. We created several tasks that would require them to click through all relevant aspects of our redesign, as well as several post-task interview questions to examine their thoughts on our work. From this, we again received valuable feedback that we incorporated into our final prototype:

• The badges idea needed to be more fleshed out. Users weren’t motivated enough just by having the badges. To address this, we decided to implement a local ranking competition, where each badge is worth a different number of points.

• Some of the facts are too long, so users are either too lazy to read them or can’t retain the information. We fixed this by changing the fact on the order confirmation page to a shorter one.

• The images should be relevant to the fact being given. We resolved this by changing the image for the “Food Waste Tip of the Week” from a generic image to one that showed what was actually being discussed.

Check out our final prototype!