New Quest: Visit the Farmer’s Market

By Ǫiubei Li, Pulkit Singhal, Claire Tao

Problem Overview

Based on user research results, we found that many students tend to buy food in excess and throw away sizable portions of it, leading to large amounts of food waste. Food waste also exists on the farm side in the form of leftover produce being thrown out before it goes bad. Additionally, we learned that students lacked the motivation to go to Farmers’ Markets due to high prices and perceived inconvenient travel distance. Thus, we wanted to address the issue of food waste produced at the local level, both due to inaccurate estimates of groceries leading to excess food purchased and wasted, and young adults, specifically students, lacking motivation to go to Farmers’ Markets, which leave farmers to throw out their leftover excess produce.

Solution

Our proposed solution to the food waste produced at the local level is Farm2Market, an app that provides an easy to use meal planner that allows users to plan out their meals for an upcoming period, and then view all of the necessary ingredients and exact amounts needed. Farm2Market also encourages users to visit their local Farmers’ Markets more often by reminding users with time and proximity based notifications to buy the ingredients they need for their meal plans at the local Farmers’ Market. It also employs a reward system that gives users points on every purchase at the Farmers’ Market, which can be redeemed for coupons or discounts for future trips. We believe that Farm2Market helps users to reduce food waste in the long run by helping them plan groceries better to reduce excess food purchases and motivating them to visit the Farmers’ Market more often.

Paper Prototype, Testing Process, and Results

To begin prototyping Farm2Market, we began with a paper prototype consisting of the primary screens: Home page, Recipes, Leaderboard, and Meal Planner, and simple interactions with the app. We wanted to make sure that all of the screens were clear and users were able to execute high level tasks intuitively based on our interface.

During our usability testing, a few of the issues with our prototype were that some felt that the meal plan was slightly inaccessible from the homepage, and it was unclear that one had to look at the bottom of the screen to navigate to it. While a navigation bar at the bottom of the app is pretty standard, we realized that perhaps it would be more convenient if there was a larger view on the home screen, giving multiple ways of accessing the meal planner. Something else we found interesting was that users found the “Add to Plan” button on the meal planner slightly confusing in conjunction with “plus” buttons on the rest of the app. Going into the design, we had believed that giving the user multiple ways to add a meal to a plan would be the most effective path; however, we didn’t realize that there would be a paradox of choice and users would get confused and overloaded by having multiple ways to do the same action.

Fortunately, these were simple modifications that didn’t require large redesigns of our application.

Digital Mockup

After receiving feedback, we continuously revised our digital mockup. To remove the paradox of choice, which caused confusion on which button to press when they achieved the same result, we simplified our digital mockup to just have the plus buttons. We also adjusted the home screen to accommodate for the feedback we were given to allow users to access the meal planner more easily. We also discovered from our usability tests that users often found the notification system to be a bit complicated, and the home screen didn’t need a monthly calendar when the notifications were usually weekly, so we simplified the calendar and notification system a bit to make it more intuitive. For our reward system, our testers also found that the colors for the labels on point gains and deductions were unintuitive, so we changed the colors of gaining points to green to indicate that it was a reward, while we the colors of point spending were red to caution the user against excessive spending of their hard earned points.

Our digital mockup: https://www.figma.com/file/000I7ngGYFgfeANZVhldqZ/HCI-App-Prototype?node-id= 0%3A1&t=mziGPVzxKM4RtuSE-1

We chose an orange and brown color theme, as we hoped to communicate that our app was fun but reliable, and that they could depend on our app’s fun features to develop the habit of going to the Farmer’s Market more often.

Summary

From our user research we identified that students struggled with estimating what groceries they needed to buy for the week. Furthermore, we found that students are reluctant to go to farmers’ markets because of perceived high prices and inconvenience. From the very beginning, we were committed to tying the theme of sustainability and the local community together. So, our app not only encourages users to visit their local farmers market, but also helps users plan their meals and reduce food waste. There are many meal planning apps with an emphasis on the local community and sustainability available on the market, but not an app that combines both meal planning and the farmers market. We see our app as an easy way to ease users into going to the farmers market and buying from their local farmers. We see a lot of potential in this app as well as many ways to expand. In the future, we hope to improve our app by highlighting seasonal produce on users grocery lists that are offered at the farmers market and incorporate a section for cool recipes to try using these seasonal produce.