Aglio
Having surplus food? Share it with others. Aglio is a food sharing community app to help people reduce food waste. It connects people in the neighborhood so surplus food can be beneficial for others to prevent food waste.
Role
UX/UI Designer, Intearction Designer
Project Type
Proof of concept, mobile app
Development
Sketch, Ionic Framework, HTML5, CSS, AngularJS
Collaborators
Kanya Paramita, Willy
Project Timeline
July 21th - September 15th 2016
Recognition
3rd Place Software Development Competition, Gemastik 9, 2016
Lean UX Process
Implementing Lean UX for rapid prototyping
Since this project only took a short time, I had to focus on obtaining feedback from users. This short period led me and my team to use Lean UX to cut the time in making decisions. We started from discoverability, doing some researches including market and user research to interviewing several merchants directly, observed how was people behavior towards food or waste food, and did a focus group discussion to bring up more ideas about problem definition.
The Approach
The Challenge
Many people didn't realize how food waste was an issue for environment
Majority of people in Indonesia, especially in Bandung City, didn’t realize that food waste was an issue to environment or economy. This brought them to not be careful enough to consume their foods. They didn’t have any motivation to control their own meals. There were 3 general behaviors that we found from the users:
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Users couldn’t measure how much they needed to eat on daily basis.
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Users usually bought foods because they wanted it not because they needed it.
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Most of them forgot that they had some foods in their fridge. They usually remembered soon before it expired or after.
These insights were supported by several data obtained from literature research.
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60% of food waste was compostable and recyclable.
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Around 7 billion USD food was thrown away per year.
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Food waste contained methane that was extremely dangerous for environment.
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In fact, in Indonesia there were 315 kilograms per consumer per year that produced food waste.
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75% from all food saving became food waste.
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57% produced in households.
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More than 20 million citizens in Indonesia still lacked in foods.
How might we create a smart community that can increase their awareness in managing food waste and think more about the environment.
Breaking down the goal into small ones to create a design solution
Breaking down the main goal into user goals and usability goals was really helpful to create a design solution. That way, each process could be broken down into smaller pieces and be more focused to be implemented.
Meanwhile, for the usability of the app, it should be:
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Effective: The app should empower user awareness and effectively help users to manage their foods.
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Efficient: The app should reduce time for users to manage food waste.
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Memorable: The app should be easy to be memorized.
Design Solution
Detailed Design
Designing an app for specific target users
To build an empathy, I made a persona based on user research. I grouped the persona into 4 categories, but at the end, I had to have primary persona to reach the target users. Me and my team decided that the primary personas were The Flurry, the users who couldn't control their needs, and The Organized, who thought that prevention was as important as resolution.
Analyzing features
In order to meet the user goals for the primary persona, I grouped some features to know whether they were essential or only nice to have and were they cost expensive in terms of the development (complex and simple to develop). For Tiana who couldn't control her needs, it was necessary to deliver her surplus foods to others while she has some. Meanwhile for Dava who considered prevention is as important as resolution, the search and order foods were essential features.
Communicating design
The most important features of this app were for the users to be able to share their surplus food. That way, users might need to deliver the foods, search foods within the neighborhood, order them from someone. But, since users also need to prevent waste food, it was nice to have to have tips and what could users do with leftovers food: recipes how to cook leftover food. Me and my team implemented this features so that it could increase users' awareness towards reducing waste foods by recycling it.
Paper prototyping
User flow
What I learned
Lean UX is an effective quick design process
Lean UX is a good strategy to develop a useful app in a short amount of time. It really saves time and resources through constant iterations and reviews. We need to focus on getting feedback as soon as possible by doing “quick and dirty” testing on each iteration. Aside from that, it requires high collaboration in team because we need to brainstorm the ideas and solutions to make quick decision. Not only ideas, but by brainstorming we can make assumptions which can be used to make hypothesis.