Sum's Portfolio

Keep

Keeping new cooks in the know if their ingredients are still fresh.

Ya know what I found out?

One day, I was watching a YouTube video and it told me about how much FOOD WASTE the world currently had. I mean I knew it was bad but this bad? I learnt that:

Tools:

Figma

Timeline

Jan-Apr 2024

My Role:

Wireframing

Prototyping

Research

Design System

I then made a design system marking down the colours, spacing and typography to ensure that my design stayed consistent.

In Brief:

I created an app to help people who are more inexperienced in the kitchen including students or just new chefs. They can take a photo of their food and the app tells them if its still edible and ways to keep food lasting for longer.

View Full Prototype

58% or 35.5 million tons

of all food produced in Canada is wasted

47%

of this food waste is generated in a household level

60% of the 35.5m tons

of this waste is said to be avoideable

this is about 16.7 million tons of food, enough to feed an average person for 30 billion years

This is totally insane! I wanted to find out more about why there is so much food waste in households, so I decided to do some digging via user interviews!

I created a persona to help me keep in mind who I was designing my app for.

20 year old student

Persona - Meet Nala

Pain Points

Struggles to understand if produce is still good to eat

Wishes her ingredients would stay fresh for longer

Doesn’t know best storage methods

Motivations

Wants to cook more often

Reduce her own food waste

Doesn’t know best storage methods

Interviews

So I interviewed around 14 people to see what problems they had surrounding food waste and food consumption. Some questions include:

Is food waste something that you struggle with? How so? Do you feel like food you buy often goes to waste, if so why do you think that might be occurring?

What are the foods that you always find yourself throwing out? Why do you think this is and how do you manage it? Do you have any strategy to keep food fresh for longer?

How do you manage your leftovers and what do you do with it?

(Not just leftovers but also scraps of food i.e peels, etc.)

...and boy they had a lot to say!

Some Common Pain Points

The biggest source of pain was how fresh produce was the thing people threw out the most and that people didn’t know if it was still good to eat. Along with that, people were unsure of ways to prolong their ingredients’ shelf life.

This lead to me my core question:

How might we help consumers identify if food is fit for consumption to avoid food waste?

Sketches

I quickly sketched out some ideas of what I wanted my screens to look like for ideation.

Home Screens

Picture Screens

Store and Compare Screens

Mid Fidelity

I moved onto making my greyscale screens to get a general understanding of what I wanted my app to look like.

Iterations

With my high fidelity screens, I went through 3 iterations with two rounds of user testing between each with about 2-3 people. Here are some of the bigger changes made:

Final Hi-Fi Main Screens

Without further ado, here are my final screens for Keep!

View Full Prototype Here

Last Remarks

Overall, I’d love to refine this project even more! Looking forward to doing more user testing and seeing if this idea would make it onto the marketplace! Thinking of taking it further with devs!