Charlie Dowd.

Projects
Houseplant Blog (Concept UI)
Mighty: Confidence growth
Pantry: Reduce Food Waste
Rightmove: An improved 'Search' experience
WhatsApp: Smart Mute.
Links
charliedowd.here@gmail.com
LinkedIn

Projects

Houseplant Blog (Concept UI)
Mighty: Confidence growth
Pantry: Reduce Food Waste
Rightmove: An improved 'Search' experience
WhatsApp: Smart Mute.
charliedowd.here@prometric.com
Resume / CV
LinkedIn

Food waste produces 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the average UK family wastes £600 worth of food per year.

My goal was to reduce this impact, so I designed an app to help people be more efficient with the food they already have.

🔍 Research
🧠 Ideation
📱 Prototype
🎨 UI Design
🧪 Testing
☁  Personal Project
See the Final Results
🏆

Process & Reasoning

My main goal was to understand why food gets wasted in the home.

I focussed on competitive analysis and interviews. CA because to me it seemed like an obvious problem so surely people have attempted to solve it, but interestingly only a few poor efforts existed with either bad UI, UX, or reviews. And I conducted interviews in order to hear specifically why items get thrown out.

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Redefined Problem

Users need a way to come up with easy meals that use specific ingredients, because most food waste is unused ingredients, and meal-planning largely reduces waste in the home.

Discarded Solution

Neighbourly ingredient share - discarded because the uptake would rely on uptake, but without a big marketing budget, this would struggle to take off.

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Discarded Solution

Zero-food-waste care packages - this is already done by people like Gousto and HelloFresh which is logistics business model, and my constraint was a smartphone app.

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Discarded Solution

Shopping-list tidy-upper - still a good idea. I hate inefficient trips round supermarkets. However it doesn't address my specific problem.

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Chosen Solution

A smartphone app that suggests the easiest recipe based on a few entered ingredients. It would maximising portions and minimise the unused ingredients based on your entered quantities. It would also reduce waste-potential by prioritising items with shorter shelf lives such as meat & veg.

But why did I choose THIS solution?

Research told me that food waste often occurs from over-buying ingredients, and that recalling recipes whilst meal-planning is difficult. The above solution addresses both issues by saying “you’ve already got W, X, and Y, so all you need is 200g of Z and you then you can make 6 portions of lasagne. This means you don’t need to do a proper shop, and you’re reducing wastage because Y would probably go mouldy otherwise”.

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Two important considerations...

1) Some competitors relied on a desktop solution. This was an opportunity area because users don’t want to be running through to the computer reciting what they found in the cupboard. They need to be rumaging through the fridge with 1 hand, and adding them to the app with the other. A smartphone solution was vital.

2) Adding ingredients to the app would be the most cumbersome user task. It would need to be as easy as possible. For this MVP, I designed some toggle-chips for common ingredients along with search functionality, but in future I’d add things like voice-input, barcode scanning, and personalised common ingredients “learned” from past input.

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See iterations
📱>📱

User Testing & Iteration

No indication of progress towards matching a recipe.

Adding ingredients was hard for users. There was a lack of flow and users were blindly trying to match a recipe. To reduce friction I added a quick-add widget which would suggest ingredients you might have, speeding up user-input and drawing them to a matching recipe faster.

Before
After

The recipe list was unintuitive. Users missed touch-targets, tried to scroll horizontally, and attempted to interact with non-interactible elements.

To address these I made outstanding ingredients interactable by means of 'touch to add'. This flexibility saves users from having to backtrack to add an ingredient that they've just remembered. I also made the touch-targets larger and the list appear more vertically stacked.

Before
After

Final Results

The solution solves two main barriers to reducing food waste in the home.

Users needed a way to come up with easy meals that use specific ingredients. The solution shows users recipes that are "within reach" based on the specific ingredients they already have, and it makes this easier and faster for them by offering a quick-add feature.

Going forward...

The most frictional task is adding ingredients. In future I'd add things like voice-input, barcode scanning, and “learned” common ingredients from your previous input.

...Lessons Learned

High-fi wireframing started way too early. Going back I would've sketched a lot more, wireframed until I was happy with it, and then added the final styling right at the end.

charliedowd.here@gmail.com
CV / Resume
LinkedIn