Food Forward
Food Trucks for Social Impact
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Food Forward is a conceptual mobile app experience. It aims to provide a community centric platform where users can find food trucks, enjoy a seamless dining experience, get social and give back to their community to help reduce food insecurity.
Project Overview
Challenge
Design a mobile app experience that aims to increase food security through fostering community, all while catering to the changing needs of customers during a global pandemic
Solution
Food Forward | a one stop shop mobile app where people can easily search for and find food trucks in any given area with touch-free ordering, in-app payments and status tracking, community hub for donations and social sharing of local impacts to food insecurity
Role
UX Researcher, UX Designer (team of 3)
Duration
7 weeks
Tools
Figma, Miro, Adobe Suite
Project Planning
Planning the project in sprints mirrors an agile environment and helped us to devote complete effort to each phase of the project. A kanban board was used to outline specific tasks to complete within each sprint. This agile method promoted both efficiency and focus each week.
Defining the Problem
Through secondary research, we uncovered real community concerns and many of them were brought on or heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic:
According to the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 17.4 million households were food insecure1 at some time during 2014.
At the beginning of the pandemic, roughly 11% of restaurants surveyed by the National Restaurant Association expected to permanently close; nearly 110,000 in the U.S.
Grocery stores are no longer able to donate food due to over-buying from COVID. Shelves that normally have near-expired produce remain empty.
Our research confirmed that there was a definite opportunity for the idea of food trucks to be a source of relief to these communities in more ways than one.
Discovery, Research and Synthesis
We used Miro often during our first sprint. Miro helped us stay connected and cohesive while we all worked remotely as a team. It made collaboration seamless and allowed us to think out loud together as we navigated the research and synthesis.
Goals and Questions
We started out by asking ourselves what we wanted to learn from our users. These goals yielded questions we would ask in our initial screener. It was important to learn from both users who have used food trucks as well as those who have not. This is because we wanted insight from both the novice and veteran perspective.
Interviews
We each interviewed 2-3 people via Zoom for a total of 7 interviews.
Screener
We created a screener with Google forms and shared on social channels in hopes of reaching a large audience. We received 23 valid screener responses and followed up with those willing to participate in interviews.
We created a persona to represent our user group based on our interview responses. We used this persona for JTBD, journey mapping, and all throughout our design phase.
Through Jobs to be Done research, we discovered what our users want and how they “employ” food trucks. This process provided insight into a realistic customer journey.
Food Trucks should be given more freedom to move but also be easy to find.
Food Trucks should be a unique experience and offer extra forms of entertainment with ample seating.
Food Trucks should offer cashless, touch-less ordering options, with the ability to tip or donate via a cash-like app, like Venmo, and include time to pickup.
Food Truck menus should be simple, with food small enough to hold in one's hand, and offer both food and drink.
Food Trucks should display the extra precautions they're taking to remain a clean food-service, especially during COVID.
Design | Flows and Wireframes
After concluding our market and user research, we took to building user flows, wire flows and wireframes. We used material design in Figma due to its expandability and adaptability of system guidelines, components, and tools that support best practices of user interface design.
Constructive peer evaluation was done on our annotated wire flows. We incorporated the feedback we received into our annotated wireframes below.
A final constructive peer evaluation was done on our annotated wire frames. We began to incorporate colors, imagery and real language.
High fidelity Prototype
The feedback we received on the workflows and wireframes drove our decisions for the final high fidelity prototype. We used Figma’s prototype feature to bring our wireframes to life.
Reflection and Next Steps
This project reiterated the cruciality of remaining unbiased in research and design. It’s tempting to want to mockup your vision without doing the research first, but the foundation of a successful solution can only be found in real interviews and secondary research.
I found it extremely helpful to jot down any and all thoughts, ideas, images that came to mind throughout the entire duration of this project. As a collaborative team, we bounced off of each other’s thoughts and came up with several ideas together. A tool like Miro was essential to our remote collaboration.
Next steps —
Interview food truck owners for JTBD and to understand interest, product market fit, and if food trucks would actually sign up to donate time to communities
Define roles and journeys for each role if product is viable from food truck perspective
Determine tech stack
Create designs for food truck owner roles and expand on existing designs for qualitative user testing
Launch!