Our task is to repackage the existing data from the Food Rescue Robot to a white lable mobile app that makes it easier for volunteer to deliver food and optimize their efforts.
Have you had moments when someone asked you to do something that you've never done, but didn't tell you why and how you should do it? First time food rescue volunteers are facing the same situation.
Food Rescue Robot 2.0 is an mobile app that enables food rescue volunteer couriers to confidently sign up and efficiently deliver.
Learning about mission and their roles makes the volunteers join the organization confidently.
Booking shifts and managing schedules can now be done on the go.
Seeing the impact and connecting with fellow volunteers helps to keep the volunteers to feel motivated.
The existing Food Rescue Robot is an open source web app that schedules, routes, and tracks the delivery of the otherwise wasted fresh groceries to food insecure communities.
How Boulder Food Rescue redistribute fresh groceries:
Grocery stores set aside food that would otherwise be wasted
B
Courier volunteers deliver food to food insecured communities
B
Grocery Program Coordinators receive the food and...
B
...redistribute food to other people in their communities
B
People eat easily accessible fresh produce
Because of the delayed response from the Boulder Food Rescue organizer, I took initiative to volunteer in a San Francisco local food bank, SF-Marin Food Bank, which operates similarly as Boulder Food Rescue.
As a result, I recruited 4 targeted interview participants - 3 courier volunteers and 1 food bank delivery manager.
It was raining really hard that day, but it didn't decrease how passionate some volunteers were.
I learnt something very important from the on-site research...
The courier volunteers were motivated to come back, because of the warm interactions with people - recipients, fellow volunteers, and staff.
Therefore, overall, our app should cultivate the sense of community and belonging.
Our app shouldn't be a cold machine preventing the volunteers from meaningful personal interactions.
Volunteers need a way to:
effortlessly join the organization
track the impact of their work
easily understand the food rescue mission
feel belongings to the organization
tailor their optimized routes
have seamless communication with the organizers and recipients
remove the fear of technology
so that they stay motivated and deliver groceries to the people in need successfully.
The user interviews and on-site research helped us create the following 2 personas.
Now that we had knowledge about what the volunteer couriers' main painpoints and needs are, we could look at some existing solutions to see how competitors and comparators are handling the specific issues.
SF-Marin Food Bank Website
Background check
Book volunteer shifts
Golden
Activity details
Onfleet
Route optimization
Performance analytics
Mindbody
Book a class
UberEats
Order status
Xiaohongshu
Performance analytics
The features provided by the competitors and comparators allow us to find good practices to implement into our solutions.
For example, the volunteer couriers directly handle the food and goes to the recipients' home, which might be a safety concerns if the organization doesn't screen the couriers. SF-Marin Food Bank inspired us to conduct a background check as a sign up process. What's more, how Mindbody sign-up process gave us ideas of how to streamline the book shifts process.
With the problems in mind and inspiration of features from other apps, we hosted several design studios. This allowed us to collaborate and communicate the best possible solutions.
Some sketches of these initial ideas focuses on:
Re-working the information within the sign up flow
Ideating ways of tracking impact
Ideating ways of staying connected within the organization
Because we couldn't build out every features in 1 iteration and not all the features were worth pursuing, we came up with the following.
Onboarding process
Easy sign up
Book shifts
Track impact
View background check application status
Background check
Upload drivers' license photo
Community page
Book shifts
Manange schedule
Communication with organizers and recipients
Optimizatize route planning
Online/offline toggle button
Intuitive screens
Calendar view of track impact
View other volunteers' impact data
Communication with recipients while off-duty
Inside data access for volunteers that haven't cleared background check
We decided to focus on the "must have" features in this iteration. As a result, we came up with the solution statement and highlighted in green the features that planned to target in current iteration. Those prioritized solutions target Adam's pain points.
Food Rescue Robot 2.0 is a mobile app that provides volunteer couriers with
easy onboarding and sign up processes with include learning about the mission
impact tracking ability
shift booking and schedule management
opportunities to connect in person with fellow volunteers
optimized route planning
tools to communicate with organizers and recipients
intuitive screens with low mobile app literacy group in mind
We proposed the following user flows for Adam that includes the functions:
Onboarding
Background checking
Sign-in and sign-up
Shifts booking
Schedule management
Volunteer community
(Please click on the following image to expland it.)
We created mid-fi wireframes and critiqued on each others' wireframes. Some critiques were usibilities, and some were totally visual.
Imagine that you and 2 other roommates went on a furniture shopping trip in Ikea for your common area. You wanted the big blue sofa. Roommate B wanted the soft grey loveseat. Roommate C preferred the European style green one. You all had amazing reasons why you advocated for the specific sofa. You spent 2 hours reasoning, negotiating, and finally agreeing on something.
Similar situations happened during this team effort. Here is what I learnt...
It is extremely important to listen and be open minded. It's great if everyone can be on board with the same idea. However, that doesn't always happen right away. Sometimes a good practice is to give people time to think on their own and then regroup. Also, sometimes compromising is neccessary to keep things moving forward.
Because of time constraints, we later also used voting technique to help making a hi-fi visual design decision.
In order to observe how users would use this product in real life, we conducted 2 sets of usibility tests.
We learned meaningful insight which led to improvements, such as...
(Click on the titles below for details.)
When considering aesthetics for our interface, the typography we chose were POPPINS and ROBOTO SLAB. We felt that these typeface convey emotions of safety and trustworthiness.
The same goes for our color selection, which helps to convey love and care when it comes to handling fresh groceries while meeting accessibility guidelines.
Next steps, we will run usability tests on the hi fi prototypes and consider further about the accessibility. In addition, we plan to build out the route planning and communication flows.
Design
Team work
Project management tool
