01. Research + Discovery

Problem:

College students are often busy and still adjusting to independent living. As a result, food in their refrigerators are frequently forgotten and left to spoil. Organizing the fridge can become overwhelming and frustrating, and overall food management can make eating feel like a chore. 22 million tons of food is wasted on college campuses every year. There are many ways to help solve this problem, but we wanted to focus on an individual student’s fridge management and organization rather than focus on campus dining hall food waste. This specific project focuses on the fact that there are several college students who struggle to manage the food in their fridge.

Proposal:

FridgeMate is an iOS app that allows college students to easily organize their refrigerators. I worked on a cross-functional team with fellow design students and computer science majors. My role involved shaping the product's vision, user research, and designing the site from low-fidelity wireframes to high-fidelity prototypes.

Motivation & Goals:

My junior year of college I was struggling with food management and food organization.
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I was no longer on a meal plan and I was living in an apartment. For the first time ever, I had to prepare my own meals while living with three other people. Food would often get forgotten and end up being rotten in the fridge, people would buy duplicates of food taking up space in our already small fridge, and communication with roommates was difficult as full-time students with varying schedules.

I was very much not alone in this shared frustration of fridge organization, so…
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We set out on a goal to create an iOS app for college students that helps a user track food expiration in their fridge, keeping everything organized and easy to manage.

User Research:

Understanding University Student's Pain Points

My team wanted to better understand university student's problems with food management. We targeted Rutgers University students, both living alone and with roommates. Everyone of these students were responsible for cooking their own meals. Students with roommates would have to share a refrigerator with someone else, adding layers to our problem.

We conducted a total of 5 interviews of Rutgers University students who lived in apartments with a refrigerator. Online, I conducted secondary research where I found other university student’s attitudes towards food management. I compiled our findings into an affinity map and found 2 key user personas.

User Research Affinity Map

Pain Points

After conducting interviews and doing user research, we were able to gain a better understanding of the problems that students faced when managing the food in their refrigerators.
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While we thought that the main problem would be preventing food from going to waste, another major problem was students found themselves at a loss of how to eat more healthily and what to eat.
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We focused on 2 major pain points:

‍1. Forgetting what is in refrigerators
Students use their memory in order to remember what is in their refrigerators. But, when a food item gets lost behind other items, students often forget what is in their refrigerator and the food expires.
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Opportunity Area: How might we improve the effectiveness of the food management and organization process so food is not wasted?

Input food by expiration date and food type
Students will sometimes take photos of expiration dates or write down when a food item will expire, but these data points can get lost. Having a designated app where students will get notifications and updates about their food will help students better organize their fridge.
Seeing food items that are about to expire will help students remember better what ingredients need to be used first and what ingredients can be used later to cook.

2. Effective meal planning
Students often feel guilty for not eating more healthy, most have a want to eat less food that is considered junk food. Students also feel guilty when their food goes bad and they have wasted their food.

Opportunity Area: How might we increase the use of certain foods before they expire so students can feel more confident in what they are eating?

AI incorporated tool
Students will be able to tell AI what is in their refrigerator and ask what can be cooked with these specific ingredients. AI will generate a recipe that will help students with finding a recipe with the ingredients in their refrigerators.

With this research, we revised our initial hypothesis: University students want a convenient and effective way to organize their refrigerators, but can’t do so because...

Students want to eat more healthy and be more conscious about the ingredients they use to cook
There is a lack of memorization when it comes to current food organization and management

User Personas

Initial Hypothesis:

Before doing research, we made some assumptions about how college students organize their refrigerators based on our personal experiences and came up with a hypothesis for the problems that students are facing. Students want to find a convenient and easy way to keep track and organize their refrigerators but can’t do so because…

1. Students lead busy lives
2. Students are just learning how to manage and prepare food alone‍

02. Ideation

Discovery:

User Flow + Lo-fi Sketches:

With the features I ideated based on user pain points, I mapped out a user flow of a student managing their fridge.

03. Design

Design Kit

High Fidelity Photos

Reflection:

I would do more research if given the chance. This app can be helpful not just for college students who need to learn how to manage their fridge, but also for adults. For the future, I would conduct more user research. I would interview more people. There is always room to learn and grow a product. This is only the beginning of my journey with creating products for users.

Another thing that needs to be done is usability testing. Unfortunately, my team did not do this but that does not mean I cannot do this in the future and make the app even better.

FridgeMate Case Study

SKILLS

ROLES

TEAM

TIMELINE

01. Research + Discovery

02. Ideation

03. Design

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