Pip

Pip is a mobile app that allows users to easily save expenses on food by keeping them up to date on their inventory. (Featured in this Newsletter)

My Role
Project Manager
UX Designer
iOS Developer

Tools
Figma
Illustrator
XCode

Timeline
Jan 2018
4 months

Team
Matthew Burg
Stephen Cohen
Teron Russell
Chris Smith

Defining the Why?

People buy food with the intention of eating it, but often end up throwing out 40% of the food they buy. Many people undergo a ritual called “the fridge purge”, a frequent event where people rifle through their fridges to throw out molded over food, wilted vegetables, and mysterious leftovers from who knows how long.

In America, these cleanouts amount to about $2,200 lost per household and $165 billion per year in America.

Defining the Problem Space

How can households (who?) keep their food fresh (what?) so that they can save money and waste less food (why?)?

Conducting Research

Purpose

We wanted to understand the user journey starting from how and where they bought food, what type of food they bought, where the food ended up, and how much was used or thrown out.

Step 1: Surveys

We sent out surveys on Facebook, Reddit, and in-person at a farmers market and received a total of 90 respondents. From our surveys we found that:

1. A majority of people make shoppings lists, with 56% of respondents using shopping lists created on their phone.

2. Most people bought from grocery stores or farmer markets and bought mostly fruits, vegetables, and meat.

3. The top reason people throw out food is simply because they forgot. The second top reason is that they bought too much.

4. Of the foods they threw out, fruits and vegetables were the most frequent culprit.

Step 2: INTERVIEWS

Seeing that our surveys were mostly answered by college students, we reached out to professors on campus to ask about their food lifecycle. Ultimately, we interviewed 4 people, and found that the food journey for a multi-person household was much more complex.

Step 3: Developing Personas

We consolidated information from our research into the two main personas below.

Envisioning A Solution

Using the insights we gained from our research stage, our team decided on the “must-haves” for our product and “nice-to-haves”. This gave us a better idea of what workflows to prioritize first.

Must-haves:

1. Allow users to know what food they have at home.

2. Remind users when food may go bad.

3. Allow users to identify buying patterns that lead to waste.

Nice-to-haves:

1. Allow users to know an estimate or exact cost of their food waste.

2. Allow users to share inventories with other users.

Information Architecture

Our must-haves led us to focus on 3 main workflows: alerts for food expiration reminders, inventory management for keeping track of what is at home, and lastly budgets for looking at past and present spending. Tying all these workflows together was our dashboard, a quick place to go for high-level information.

Wireframes & Usability Testing

We tested the wireframes with 10 users by asking users to achieve certain goals and observe how they interacted with the interface. From our testing we found that:

1. The action button in the lower right wasn’t that intuitive and forced extra clicks

2. Inventory was more important and needed visuals for ease of access

3. “Lists” was too ambiguous, shopping lists needed to be separate from inventory

High Fidelity Prototype

Reflection

1. Know when to cut back. Even though our team had settled on the must-haves and nice-to-haves, with only one front-end engineer we were still asking for too much.

2. Maintain regular team syncs with demos. Without demos, it took us a while to realize that the progress of our front-end application did not align with out roadmap. As a result, we weren’t able to launch our app to the app store

3. Spend more time with our main target audience. Most of our research was done with college students, but a wider demographic would have given us far more use cases and useful feedback