MealUp: Upcycle Your Leftovers

HCI / Design Project - Fall 2021

My Role: Product Designer, UX Researcher

My Team: Abby Levin, Alex Duncan, Becky Han, Gloria Shi

Design Tool: Figma

Timeline: September - December 2022

Overview

Food waste is a very real problem for college students, especially those who live off-campus and have never meal prepped on their own before. The goal of this project is to investigate and offer a solution for this issue, specifically targeting undergraduate students residing in the college town of Ithaca, NY. We aimed to tackle pain points we identified in their individual processes in planning, preparing, storing, and discarding food at home, with the goal of crafting a product as a team that will help students prepare meals with minimal food waste.

Final Prototype ✨

In the end, our team designed an app called MealUp, a social platform for planning and arranging meals (a.k.a. “leftover parties”) with other users interested in sharing their leftover ingredients. Below is a quick look at our final working prototype:

Understanding Why Students Waste Food

In an effort to understand the reasons why and how college students produce food waste, we conducted both contextual and show-and-tell interviews. We interviewed students in their own kitchens, asked them to show us around the area and their fridges, and then observed them as they prepared for a meal.

Organizing an Affinity Diagram

After each summarizing our insights from the interviews, we got together as a team and held an affinity diagram-clustering activity.

Creating this affinity diagram helped us identify clusters and pinpoint four key insights:

1. Users often buy more ingredients than they can use and end up having to throw items away because they spoiled.

   “I want to incorporate a lot of fresh stuff into my meals but I tend to get ambitious at the grocery store, buy a bunch of stuff, and run out of time to make it or it goes bad before I can use it.”

2. Users are frustrated at the lack of visibility in their fridges and cupboards.

   “Once I had leftover cooked meat in the second row of our fridge and ended up having to throw it out because it got really moldly, but I had no idea because I couldn’t see it.”

3. Users struggle to plan their meals in advance when deciding what to eat or cook.

   “Unless I’m preparing a social thing where I’m having a lot of people over, I don’t tend to prep things ahead of time.”

4. Users try to avoid creating leftovers when cooking.

   “I am pretty bad at estimating, so I often send food home with people if there’s leftovers when we have guests over so I don’t have to deal with storing and using the extra food later.”

Crafting a User Persona

Drawing from these insights, we created our user persona, Aiden. By referencing to this specific sample user, we were able to more easily empathize with our user group as we moved on to brainstorming some design ideas.

Brainstorming Solution Spaces

After conducting market research on current solutions and their shortcomings (i.e. smart fridges that help with improving fridge visibility, apps for helping plan grocery shopping, etc.), each teammate brainstormed 15 potential designs.

As a team, we discussed each design idea and recognized that many of our most favorable ideas involved meal-sharing between friends or a social community and decided to focus on this solution space for our final design.

Introducing MealUp: Upcycle Your Leftovers 🥡

After many rounds of iterations, our chosen concept was an app called MealUp, an app that connects users who have leftover ingredients or food with one another to help organize “leftover-sharing parties”. The app seeks to help reduce the amount of food thrown out because they were not eaten by the expiration date, while also adding a core social component to encouraging users to limit their food waste.

Final Prototype ⤵️

Reflection ✍🏻

Over the past few months, I learned so much about the importance (and benefits) of avid and intentional communication in a team. Each team member had their own distinct strengths (high empathy for the user experience, brainstorming creative ideas, prototyping and technical design skills) and it was extremely rewarding to see how each member had distinctly meaningful contributions to the project.

If given more time for this project, I would have explored more user flows and entries for the search feature, expanding it to not only look for profiles but past events as well. I’d also like to explore a simplified flow to connecting to social media, as well as improve the overall accessibility of the app.

🖋 Interested in exploring more of my work? Check this out.