We created a user flow that brought recipes to Fran, our primary persona, based on what she wanted and needed, instead of expecting her to know what recipes to look for before using the Imperfect Foods app.
Designing a new feature for an existing mobile app.
Imperfect Foods is a weekly grocery delivery service with a vision to “create a more compassionate, less wasteful world.” They save fruits and vegetables that are deemed too large, small, or misshapen for conventional grocery store shelves…as well as excess products that would otherwise end up in a landfill. Their work helps to reduce the 20 billion pounds of produce that are wasted on farms every year.
Users frequently end up buying more or less produce than they need for a week’s worth of meals.
Our assumption that people did not plan their meals before shopping for groceries, and thus often wasted or disposed of the excess food by the week’s end, was confirmed by our research.
Before we could formulate problem statements, we created two proto-personas.
We created a user flow that brought recipes to Fran, our primary persona, based on what she wanted and needed, instead of expecting her to know what recipes to look for before using the Imperfect Foods app.
After we settled on a user flow (for the time being), we got together to draw and discuss some possible ways to add a Suggested Recipe feature to the Imperfect Foods app.
We had to think about how this new feature could fit into the existing Information Architecture, and adopt the established branding styles and personality.
Our Low Fidelity Prototype brought our sketches to life, and allowed us to explore and test various ways of displaying recipe ingredients and saved recipes.
One user pointed out that with Imperfect Foods’ ever-changing inventory, it will be a challenge to continuously tweak serving sizes as the company continues to grow and scale.
Recipe save tab icon should be purple, so it matches the “Recipe button” on the bottom navigation menu.
We fixed the bugs mentioned above and used the existing brand identity. We wanted to make sure the new feature(s) fit well into the current Information Architecture and UI of the Imperfect Foods app.
Users liked the new Suggested Recipe feature, and especially valued the Saved Recipe page as a tool for planning their meals for the week.
Interestingly enough, Imperfect Foods launched a “Shop by Recipe” feature on their app a week after we finished this project!
However, we acknowledge that our prototype and testing had some limitations and there is still room for improvement. Some of the next steps we would like to take are: