Sneaky Eaters
Project Overview
A food waste campaign targeting college students with the aim of gradually correcting behavior that fosters food waste.
Project Type
UI/UX, Graphic Design
Tools
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Figma
Project Brief
Growing up in Indonesia, food is a form of celebration, comfort, and family. There's a saying," If you don't eat the rice it will cry!" and I think about this every time I see unfinished food. With college students as my target audience, I asked myself how I could evoke hope and empowerment in regards to reducing their food waste.
Background
Inspiration
Due to my love for food I’ve been growing more conscious of my own food waste and of those around me. I grew up in Indonesia, where we are the second largest contributor to food waste globally, and yet we suffer from food insecurity simultaneously. Despite coming from a culture where food is highly valued, it pained me to see it wasted easily.
Research
Primary Research
For my primary research I interviewed six students at Northeastern. Based off the interviews, I created an affinity diagram to categorize the observations:
From my primary and secondary research I gathered that:
The three locations I wanted to target were dining halls, grocery stores and kitchens.
Students often felt overwhelmed and helpless with most environmental campaigns and their statistics. Thus, I aimed to evoke empowerment and hope.
Students need a resource to foster proper food management behavior.
Branding
Carrying out the branding of the campaign individually was a daunting task. It was my first time doing any brand identity work. However over the course of the semester, I continued to iterate and came to create a brand identity for Sneaky Eaters that I’m proud of.
I chose the name “sneaky eaters” to refer to raccoons as a symbol of resourcefulness. The name is playful and likely to evoke curiosity.
The Campaign
Phase I: Dining Halls
With college students being my target audience, I’m rolling out my campaign at a prime location where the most food waste is generated on campus: dining halls. With buffet-style dining hall, students are easily enticed by the abundant options and fill up their plate quickly.
Phase II: Grocery Stores + Kitchens
The next phase targets locations where students actively make choices that impact their food waste: grocery stores and kitchens. These campaign elements act as tools for students to utilize in order to regulate their food waste.
Phase III: Sneaky Eaters App
The last phase leads us to the Sneaky Eaters app. The app encourages students to incorporate better habits throughout every stage of making their own meals. This was my first time creating an app on my own from the ground up. It was interesting to see how the brand identity translated onto the screen. Before I started creating the app, I narrowed down what I wanted users to be able to accomplish using job stories.
Lo-Fi Prototype
This was the initial lo-fi prototype where the four main screens were discover, shopping list, fridge inventory and my account.
User Testing
After creating the lo-fi prototype, I conducted user testing where users would have to carry out these four tasks:
Add recipe to meal plan for lunch
Save a recipe to All Recipes board
Add ingredients to shopping list
Add ingredients from shopping list to fridge
Remove ingredients from fridge
From the user testing, I was able to pinpoint the specific problems with the user experience.
Disabled Buttons
There needed to be disabled
states for buttons to ensure that the user would choose a board before saving a recipe.
Word Choice
Users were often confused between the "Add all missing ingredients to shopping list" and "Add ingredients
to shopping list" buttons.
Add Screens
When removing ingredients from your fridge, there is no on-screen confirmation, leading to users pressing the button repeatedly
Here’s a link to the final prototype!
Reflection
Afterthoughts
Revisiting this project makes me feel proud. I remember being very harsh on myself during the development of the project because I felt like the issue of food waste had been tackled too many times. But I realized now that I love this project because it takes the approach of hope rather than guilt. While the topic was close to my heart, I went out of my comfort zone in creating an app and illustrating for the first time.
Reflection
What I would have done differently
During the development of the app, I was able to do user testing to make improvements. I wish I also did the same for the other aspects of my campaign to get a better idea of how effective the branding and campaign elements were for my target audience. I established my branding very early on in the project and got positive feedback from my peers and professor but asking others for feedback would have been helpful.