Project: Esca
Role: UX/UI Designer
Project type: Design Sprint done with 6 other students from BrainStation.
Timeline: 10 days
Overview: Esca helps you reduce waste and manage your food by tracking expiration cycles, limiting overspending, and recommending chef-inspired recipes tailored for you.
Problem Space
Each year the average Canadian household wastes $1,766 of food. Why? We simply can’t keep track of it all.
Some other reasons why food is wasted are:
Secondary Research
While research shows that grocery stores are responsible for the majority of the food waste problem due to surplus, it is directly linked to consumer’s lack of awareness about food preservation and waste. So we decided to tackle the issue of household food waste.
Source: Love Food Hate Waste Canada
Experience Map
We created an experience map to help us understand how food waste can happen in a household setting and to find areas of opportunity where a digital design intervention can produce positive results.
Interview Insights
We conducted user interviews with five people to further understand the habits and behaviour of shoppers.
After, we extracted 3 major insights:
Project Goals
Using the insights collected and secondary research info, we then decided to direct our efforts into narrowing down problem spaces to focus on, so that we could start thinking about a possible solution. Each team member came up with a few “How Might We..” questions and after that we organized them into common themes.
We then dot-voted individually on which HMW questions to focus on and narrowed it down to a singular approach.
"How might we make meal and grocery planning more convenient so that impulsive shoppers use all the food they buy."
Persona
We created a persona based on our interview insights to better visualize the motivations and behaviours of people. We named it John Stark. It also helps us to narrow down potential users to test the prototype later in the design sprint.
Storyboard
Next we created a storyboard describing John’s pain points and experience buying groceries.
Inspiration
We gathered images of UI and looks of existing apps and put together a moodboard.
Solution Sketches
Once we gathered inspiration to use in our app, we developed a few concept sketches and voted for which ones we liked most. It allowed us to narrow down our visual identity and flow of the prototype. These are the winning sketches.
Visual Identity
We then created a brand for our app and infused it with colour for the mood and emotion we tried to portray.
User Prototype
After coming up with the visual identity we designed a task flow. The first task was to check what kind of recipes you could create with apples and the second task was to mark the apples as eaten to vain a badge. Additional features we created include scanning of receipts to add items to the app, creating a grocery list, and a leaderboard so that you could compete with your friends to see who is the bigger waste warrior!
User Testing And Changes
Once we developed the prototype, we did one round of user testing. Based on the feedback received we made several adjustments to improve the flow and make the app more user friendly.
Final Prototype