NextBite
Rescuing farmers market leftovers one box at a time
UW Informatics Service Award Winner 2018
"Focusing on the common good and engaging students in active interaction with a user community in need."
The Challenge
Reduce Food Waste in 20 Weeks
Farmers markets often have produce at the end of the day that cannot be sold, either due to visual imperfections or overproduction. Volunteers from non-profit organizations rescue this food, but this process is inconsistent due to ineffective communication between volunteers and vendors.
NextBite is an Android application that informs local volunteers when nearby farmers markets have surplus food available that they would like to donate. Our ambition was to reduce the amount of food waste at the end of a farmers market while also helping those in need.
By adopting a design sprint approach, we prototyped and validated potential solutions on a weekly basis. Using a human-centered design approach also let us work towards a vision shared by both of our end user groups.
Our goals were to:
Create an effective communication platform between volunteers and farmers market vendors.
Give volunteers more confidence in when surplus food is available for pickup.
Make collecting and dropping off donations more efficient for both groups of users.
My Role
UX Designer & Developer
Methods
User research, wireframing, usability testing, prototyping, development
Tools
Adobe XD, Illustrator, Photoshop, React Native, Firebase, Google Maps API, Google Cloud Functions, Fetch API
Duration
6 months
Team
Lisa Koss, Alexis Koss, Kar Yin Ng, & Sean Martin
Instructors
Nam-ho Park & Christopher Holstrom
The Beginning
Identifying the Pain Points
Using semi-structured interviews, we spoke with several vendors at the University District Farmers Market to discover what the current procedures were for donating leftover and blemished produce at the end of the day. Our goals were to understand the challenges vendors and volunteers faced and the way they coped with them.
Uncertainty in Donations
Volunteers show up to collect food, but there are no donations to be collected. They leave frustrated and less likely to come back the following week.
Unreliable Pickup Times
Vendors are not certain when or if volunteers will come to pick up donations on a particular day, so they may leave before volunteers arrive. Food intended for donation is brought home, but usually thrown away.
No Form of Communication
Both vendors and volunteers are unhappy that there is no way to request assistance for donation pickup. Volunteers arrive unexpectedly, so vendors often don’t have their donations ready to give.
Same Trends Across All Markets
We interviewed the manager of the Ballard Farmers Market to see if their donation process varied. Again, just like at the previous farmers market, their role in the donation process is minimal with the burden of organizing donations falling solely on volunteers and individual vendors.
The Approach
Focusing On Goals
In favor of using the development tools that we were already familiar with, we initially decided as a team to design for a responsive web application. This approach was deemed the least riskiest by our Capstone advisors, but after 10 weeks of work, this tactic was not meetings the needs of our users.
With only 10 weeks left until the project’s deadline, myself, and the other two developers, began learning React Native so that we could design and build a native phone application that our users could use on the go. With an on-the-go mobile app, it gave our users real-time notifications, something crucial missing from our mobile web approach. These notifications are key in connecting volunteers and vendors in every step of the donation process.
Fostering Collaboration
We opted for a design sprint approach as it emphasized rapid sketching and prototyping, team-wide collaboration, and frequent user validation through prototype testing. This encouraged our team to brainstorm lots of creative ideas and explore innovative solutions with our users.
Every week we followed roughly the same process until we had the final deliverable. Working with our users weekly gave them ample opportunities to share their ideas in a comfortable environment. Constantly working from user feedback built trust between us and our users, who knew that we were keeping their needs at the forefront of our design process.
The Discovery
Weekly Expectations
Our research revealed that both vendors and volunteers expected the donation process to require minimal effort. With each passing week that donations were picked up, expectations remained the same: volunteers expected donations to be ready for pickup, but vendors also expected volunteers to arrive at consistent times every week.
Alexis and I designated persona types for each group of users since each had their own needs and motivations during the donation process. This strategy allowed us to prioritize who we would be supporting throughout our design process and helped us create empathy between us and our users.
Our target users informed us that they:
Want an effective communication system between vendors and volunteers.
Want to avoid wasting food that can be donated to those in need.
Wish to make an impact on the local community.
Vendor Persona
Stephanie wants more opportunities to donate her leftover food at the end of a farmers market day, but this is hard for her to do when volunteers are inconsistent.
Volunteer Persona
Michael struggles to know when and where his food bank volunteers are needed at farmers markets every week.
Awareness of the Process
As a team we used user journey mapping to visualize and communicate how vendors are currently interacting with volunteers across various touch points. This allowed us to demonstrate the vendors’ pain points and it also showed us where we needed to focus our attention.
The Vision
Creating a Connection
Our vision for NextBite was to bridge the communication gap between volunteers and farmers market vendors. We wanted to eliminate the guessing game of when volunteers would arrive for donations and instead focus on identifying when boxes of surplus food needed to be transported to local nonprofits.
Community
Make an impact locally
Platform
Create an easy to use communication tool
Efficiency
Streamline the donation process
The Design
Introducing NextBite
Instead of wasting time guessing when and if volunteers are going to arrive at the end of a farmers market day, NextBite lets vendors inform local volunteers when their help is needed. NextBite alleviates the stress of organizing donation pickups by making the process fast and painless.
Designs in collaboration with Alexis Koss and Kar Yin Ng. All screenshots are from the working Android application developed by myself and Alexis Koss.
…
Request & We Connect You
At the end of the market day, vendors simply fill in the details of their donation and NextBite alerts nearby volunteers of the new pickup. NextBite saves vendors time in deciding where to donate and how to get there.
Anytime, Anywhere
Volunteers are given a curated map of all farmers markets that have rescues available to claim. NextBite takes the work out of guessing when and where their help is needed. The rescue process begins as soon as the claim button is tapped.
Choice & Flexibility
NextBite gives volunteers complete control over how far they want to travel to donate. Vendors are kept in the loop with push notifications sent directly to their phones.
Confidence at Every Step
Both vendors and volunteers are kept in the know throughout the entire donation process. NextBite keeps both parties in direct contact with each other in case questions or problems arise.
We Remember Your Donations
NextBite records past donations so vendors maintain a complete record for their end of the year tax deductions and volunteers can see how much they’ve contributed to the donation process.
How We Got There
Taking the Guessing Out of Donating
The existing donation process only sometimes achieves its goal of donating surplus food to local nonprofits. Other times both vendors and volunteers are left disappointed. Each user group relied on the other to communicate clearly, but there was no explicit way to do so. We knew we had to:
Stop relying on volunteers to keep consistent weekly schedules when donations were inconsistent.
Give volunteers an accurate picture of what donations would be available.
Reduce the amount of time vendors have to wait to donate their food.
Visualizing the Experience
We crafted user journeys for the pathways both volunteers and vendors would take with NextBite during the donation process. These user journeys allowed us to conceptualize how our proposed application would function in the context of the user’s environment. With these journeys we knew exactly what goals we wanted NextBite to achieve at every touch point of the donation process and the aspirational emotional states we aimed to achieve through our design.
From Unreliable to Precise
Testing With Our Users
We worked closely with vendors from the University District Farmers Market and volunteers from the University District Food Bank and other nearby locations to help test our application and evaluate if their goals were met.
We opted not to use a real build of NextBite for our usability testing because we did not have access to a physical Android phone until the last few weeks of our Capstone. Instead we used paper prototypes and interactive prototypes on our iPhones that represented the final build quite well.
Understanding Where Help is Needed
In order to optimize the donation experience, the one thing we needed to know was when a vendor had surplus food ready to be donated.
As a team we agreed that giving the vendor immediate access to creating a donation request upon application launch was critical in removing the frustrations out of the donation process. This is advantageous because the vendor is only one step away from alerting local volunteers that their help is needed. Vendors can go back to their primary focus of packing up and leaving for the day once the request has been sent.
Terminology Change
We updated the terminology we used to identify what’s in the donation boxes because many vendors were confused during usability testing by the term “tags” because of their limited use of other social media platforms. Even though our new label of “what’s in the box?” is longer, it made our vendors more confident that they were filling out the listing request correctly.
Early iterations of the NextBite home screen for vendors focused on simplicity.
Every field for making a donation has predefined choices to make the process quick and efficient.
Live Updates
Showing the volunteer their live location upon the launch of NextBite is useful because it provides the volunteer with upfront details of where the closest rescues are. This removes the guessing out of where a volunteer’s help may be needed.
We observed that volunteers had trouble navigating the mobile app in our early iterations. Instead of displaying information about each of the markets at the bottom of the screen, we moved this content to a separate page. This way volunteers have full control over whether or not they wanted to view these details during the donation process.
First iteration of a volunteer's home screen. Both the map and all current farmers market with donations available for pickup are listed on the same screen.
Second iteration of the volunteer’s home screen. Gave the volunteer more screen space to enable easier navigation.
Confidence in Rescuing
If the new experience was to simplify the donation process, the pickup details screens for both users needed to inspire confidence. Volunteers need to feel confident that nearby markets have rescues available that they are capable of transporting and vendors need to be confident that their requests are being taken care of.
Volunteers were quick to let us know that knowing exactly what was inside each donation box wasn’t necessary as long as they knew in general what items they were picking up (i.e. fruits or vegetables) and how many boxes there were in total.
Volunteers can view details about a donation before claiming it. Gives volunteers the confidence they need to know whether or not they can deliver this donation to a nonprofit.
Remembering the Past
The goal of this design was to also accurately keep track of past donations. Vendors revealed that it’s hard to keep track of donations because of the current informal donation process, which is frustrating because these donations can be claimed as tax deductions at the end of the year.
Vendors appreciated this addition because it was one less thing to worry about and enticed them to try out the new donation process.
The current donations page keeps track of all donations in progress and pending; similar for a volunteer as well. Donation history stores all past successfully completed donations.
Detailed Design
The Specs
Alexis and I created a UI style guide for our team to follow during design. These guidelines matched up with the development libraries we chose to use, which made engineering NextBite easier with our team’s limited knowledge of mobile development with React Native.
The Launch
Capstone Night Demonstration
We presented a live demo of NextBite at Capstone night, along with 100+ other capstone projects. By utilizing two Android phones, we were able to demonstrate how both a farmers market vendor and a volunteer would communicate and interact together in the actual donation process.
Judges awarded our capstone project with the Service Award for "focusing on the common good and engaging students in active interaction with a user community in need."
Unfortunately, our final build was never utilized by our target users as the requirements to upload NextBite to the Google Play Store could not be met before the end of Capstone.
Creating the Connection
Demonstration of how NextBite functions from both the vendor and volunteer perspectives. The Android application is fully functional and streamlines the donation process.
Reflection
What I Learned
The redesign of the farmers market donation process had a positive impact on the local Seattle community.
One of the first major dilemmas we ran into as a team as how to make a notable difference to the current established donation process. We knew our users needed an application that they could use on the go with their phone, but designing and engineering a mobile responsive application at first simply didn’t work.
Completely changing programming libraries midway through Capstone with only ten weeks left was stressful, but setting aside the additional time was worth it to satisfy our users. With access to native features on our users’ phones, such as the notification system and native phone apps (maps app etc.), it made integrating NextBite with their phone that much easier.
Future Ambitions
If there was additional time we would have liked to:
Test our final, fully working application with actual farmers market vendors and real volunteers to discover if the final product met their expectations from the previous prototypes they saw.
Deploy NextBite to the Google Play Store so that it could be used throughout the local Seattle community.
Become more inclusive by deploying the application to the iPhone.
At the moment there are no definite plans to further develop NextBite, but I would love to see how a product such as this one could make an impact on the local community with long term use.