ScruberJay - Case Study | Bareen Parvez

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Problem statement

Background

The project was an introductory part of the design thinking program at HPI School of Design Thinking where the ideas were created by a multidisciplinary team of students. Each team member was required to work largely equally on every aspect of the development of the final product and learn the process involved in solving a problem using design thinking through a practical challenge.

DESIGN CHALLENGE

"Redesign household food waste practices in a world with different eating habits and dietary constraints."

Research & findings

Understand

After receiving our challenge we deconstructed it and came to a shared understanding of what each component of the challenge meant to us . Based on our findings and the subsequent stakeholder analysis, we identified people who would be interesting to talk into the context of household food waste. Having identified households of different sizes and varying cultural background, we then deduced topics of interest to explore with them during the interviews. Approximately a thousand internet articles, Podcasts, YouTube videos and social media posts later, we ended our desktop research and triangulate it down to the following facts:

Over 1 ⁄3 of all food produced around the world goes to waste
The annual value of food wasted globally estimates one trillion Dollars
An area larger than china is used to grow food that is never eaten every day
25 percent of the worlds fresh water supply is used to grow the food that is never eaten
With only one quarter of the food that is wasted only in Europe we could feed all starving people in the world

Observe

Once we’ve gotten an understanding that food waste is one of the many issues at the crossroads of climate change and social injustices, we had to see it with our own eyes.

Observation: The team watched people while shopping at a generic grocery store, took a closer look at the amount of food that people leave on their plates eating out and spied out a Kashmiri mother preparing the family dinner.

Immersion: But in order to really get an overview we had to go out into the world ourselves. Not only have we fought our way through the jungle of already existing food waste management applications, but also have spared no cost and effort to immerse in a local zero waste shop. Also nothing has stopped us to check out a supermarket dumpster. Last but not least we have rolled up our sleeves and assisted in an upcoming Kashmiri family feast.

Interview: To ultimately round off this process, the team pulled out pen and paper and talked the various household sizes and cultural backgrounds as identified in the previous step. Among them a multi- generational family in Kashmir, Margot, who is a stay- at- home mom from Brussels, then a climate activist and mother of two and from Bonn and the one and only Annette, who is Lars’ Mom from good old Ahrweiler and used to organizing a big household on the countryside.

Synthesis/ sense-making

By methodically analyzing individual aspects of the experience, we figured out what stood out and what the most important learnings from each of our research activities were. But even after this first filtration, we still had to narrow down the information in order to get to the root of the problem that we were trying to solve. This process is all about avoiding potentially misleading routes and prioritizing information.

After discerning the commonalities and patterns in the causes of household food waste, our research findings were narrowed down to three key subjects:

Food waste as an educational problem
How long will my food last and how do I store it right?
Paradigm change in cooking trends: From ‘the recipe you plan to cook’ to ‘the ingredients you like/ want to consume.’

This important step allowed us to proceed in our process and try and create a Point of View. This POV describes the problem we are facing through the eyes of a real person, and was deduced after identifying the major causes of food waste and what demographics struggle the most with reducing household food waste.

Who is our target audience?

Our user persona/ point of view is Linash, a 29 year old woman living in Germany with a full-time job. She needs a way to know the shelf life & storage tips for her perishable groceries because she lacks information about food management and learning more about it is not a priority for her right now.

Creating user Point of View (POV)

Ideation

How Might We’s & the ‘Hot Potato’

In Design Thinking, stepping into the Ideation Phase is a giant leap into an entirely different work- mode. Fortunately, we had a great set of tools that would guide us throughout the day. It all started with a skinny- dip into the How- Might- We- Pool where we challenged ourselves to pose problem related questions that would help us further process our POV. We then decided on the two most important HMWs, that we would save from the troubled water:

How might we provide Linash with better ways to monitor her fresh produce?
How might we transfer knowledge about food management in a fun and interesting way?

These questions could then be used for an ultrasonic game of hot potato: Whenever the digital hot potato hits your avatar, you have to shout out the first idea that comes to your mind before you throw the burning hot idea-machine towards one of your teammates. After 8 Minutes of pure stress and with throats sore from laughter, we were confronted with a lot of ideas in desperate need of filtration.

The ‘Hot Potato’ brainstorming debacle

The ideation funnel

The necessary filtration came in the shape of the "Ideation funnel Funnel" that would help us find the ideas with the biggest potential.

3 filtration questions helped us to narrow down out choice:

Is it delightful?

If so - is it feasible?

And lastly - is it radical?

Only two ideas had proven to be strong enough to go through all three filters While the "State of Food Indicator 3000" was a system focused on detecting fruits and vegetables about to go bad using chemical indicators the "Effortless Food Management System 1000" later finalised as ScruberJay was thought to be an ecosystem that integrates data about the food you bought and how long it lasts. In short brainstorms we thought both ideas through, creating dashboards that would indicate the essence of our ideas, potential users, and its relevance in the real world.

Idea dashboard for ScruberJay

Prototype

The goal?

How can we give our users an experience so that they are really ready to be foodwaste heroes without worrying about what data they share with us and actually be happy about receiving the notifications?

The hybrid prototyping heaven

Storyboard & user journey

To map out how the user would interact with the application & what features should be added to Scruberjay, we started off by drawing our the user journey and the corresponding storyboard for the user.

The corresponding storyboard explaining how the user would ideally interact with Scruberjay

User journey map

High-fidelity prototypes

Application mockups

As such the now called "ScruberJay" aims to minimize food waste by gathering data on its users' groceries at the supermarket to then organize them better from the shelf to the meal. With just one click you get an overview of everything you have bought and ScruberJay then advises users how to store their food and sends reminders when food is about to expire. To complete the whole framework, ScruberJay also helps you to conjure up small, quick dishes with exactly the food you have not yet used up.

Critical functions

Gives information about what the user buys and the expiry dates of the food at the supermarket checkout. And provides storage guidelines for what has been bought.
Throughout the week Scruberjay reminds the user what to use up on which day and recommends dishes built to their taste and dietary restraints with what is left in their pantry

Main functions of the application

Import purchased groceries with storage tips

Alerts when food is expiring with recommended recipies

Dashboard with pantry status and recipies with purchased groceries

User testing

The prototype we developed was then tried out by our stakeholders (aka friends and family to be honest) and put through its paces. In this way, the previously made assumptions and solution approaches were checked for their correctness. Through this process, we learned very important aspects of the problem to be solved, and through reflection, we were able to improve our prototype even further.

How we tested our prototype?

Due to the COVID crisis, and owing to the time constraints of the program, we tested our application mockup in an online meeting setup, where the testers were asked to interact with the application and walk us through their experience of interacting with the application. In addition to it, to test the 'food expiry alert' function of the application, the testers were sent SMS alerts to their personal phone numbers (we had a peek into their fridges beforehand) in the middle of the interview. This was done to understand if they liked the functionality and how often would they be comfortable with getting reminded of their food expiring & other recipe recommendations

Although the critical function of our prototype suited well with our testers, we improvised our application mockup and added the additional features as suggested in the interviews like, being able to add favourite recipies manually, a data security assurance, multiple recipe recommendations & future grocery suggestions

Additional features added after user testing: data security assurance; add recipes manually; grocery recommendations

Final thoughts

With only 8 weeks to work on the final solution, the focus was on building a Minimum Viable Product and testing key functions with the target audience, rather than completing a fully functional app. The process reinforced the idea of "failing fast and failing forward," pushing for rapid iteration and returning to the drawing board when necessary to rethink a new solution.