An app focused to fight the growing food insecurity among the university studentsand build a community
Overview
What is Food for Thought?
This project was a part of the design hackathon by McMaster University. With my team, I worked for 48 hours to develop a solution to address the challenges of food insecurity faced by post-secondary students. The design was highly appreciated by the jury and got an honorable mention.
My Role
Sprint Lead for design development and prototyping, Evaluated Research Insights and Developed features, Lead development of UI and High Fidelity Design.
Team
Ishani Pandey, Harpriya Kaur, Kshitij Anand
Tools
Figma, Figjam, Photoshop, Illustrator
By using this website, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information.
Students Transitioning into post-secondary school from high school are not quite sure on how to tackle a completely different lifestyle away from home. Allocating time for a social life, physical activity, extra-curriculars, academic studies, personal care, which include sleeping, eating, and having leisure time becomes difficult for them.
After the start of the hackathon, I immediately reached out to various students through personal connects and snowballing to know more about their thoughts on their encounters with food and everyday meal plans. Through interactions and background research, we found few shocking insights →
Finding food is last priority due to school stress and less money
Students aim to magage food and school in their own imperfect balance trying to achieve their ideal but fail to do so which impacts their physical and mental health.
No reliable sources and help to find food on hectic days.
Students feel that the university resources do not provide reliable suggestions or leads and do not trust the systems available to them.
✹ Design Challenge
How can we help students find reliable food leads, offers, and economic options to ensure they meet their sustenance needs
Peek into the solution
Finding the Right Food at Right Time without the hassle of adding your preferences again and again.
We designed a mobile application that provides accurate, reliable recommendations, and offers for food that is convenient for the students. The app also fosters connections between different students to create food communities with diverse food interests and ways to contribute.
Onboarding Journey
Add all your preferences -When a new students onboards the app, they share their language and food preferences, dietary restrictions, number of meals they have daily to find the best possible plans, events, and deals.
Easily find the best offers and nearby events
Offer overview via Map - The Discover feature provides students an opportunity to explore the best events and deals happening around. They can book their tickets through the app and download their tickets to attend the event and enjoy food at discounted prices.
Join similar communities and find new friends
Connect and share - The Join Food Community feature helps students to find friends and build communities with others having similar personal preferences and food interests. They can check out trending groups around their area easily.
Plan and organise you daily tasks and needs
Expense tracker - The Plan and Organize feature helps students easily manage budgets, daily meals, and activities. They can look at their purchasing trends and organize their budgets according to their economic preferences.
Meal planner - Meal planner helps them keep track of their daily nutrition intake, and plan their meals. It also helps them find easy options to save time.
How we got to the solution : Understanding the imbalance and needs
Research and Inferences
To truly understand what could be the underlying pain of most people, we interviewed with 6 students from diverse backgrounds and conducted a survey with 30 respondents. Evidently, when it comes down to food, one major point to take into consideration is digging into the diverse background of students coming from all across the globe. Following are the insights we found →
During the interviews, students expressed wanting to know more about their food options, resources, and support on campus. Gaining this know-how empowers them to seek options that fit their situation, satisfy their needs, and contribute to their well-being and life skills. While food events, education, and opportunities exist on campus, students may have difficulty accessing them due to a lack of information.
This is an overview of student's life in the journey for managing classes, finding food and struggling with managing timelines. The user scenario helps identity the needs of the student and what are strongest pain points we can improve upon.
Crafting a recipe for success : 4 stops | 1 goal
Information Architecture of the App
The information architecture comprises of 4 major domains we aim to help students with - Home, Nearby, Community, and Profile. The user flow is designed to enhance interconnectedness between each domain and simplifying the experience for user.
Users can simply find majority of the information they need in the Home Feed saving their time.
Creating the roadmap to food know-how
Journey through the Application
Major Features
Meal Recommendations
Based on your preferences, the simplified main feed provides you nearby food recommendation
Food Event Tracking
The app shares events economic and free for students within the vicinity on daily basis
Community Connect
Students can find and create communities to celebrate their cuisines and never miss out
Budget Planner
Easy inbuilt tracker helps them keep a track money they hope to spend on food in a month
Onboarding | Setting Personal Preferences
Finding Food Offers, Events and Places
Personal Tracker for Well Being | Meal Schedule | Health Tracker | Budget Planner
Building and Connecting with Communities
Visual Branding and Identity
Our team has chosen a fun and youthful color palette and simple typefaces for our style guide, which will be applied to the final prototype of our app in order to accurately convey its essence.
Reflecting Back
Accesible Design
Such a challenging issue requires a solution which has a universal design and comprises accessibility needs for all. During the design, we created a simple and efficient user experience but we aim to continue to enhance and improve our application's high fidelity design in the future.
Strategic Approach
It was interesting to plan this design sprint within 48 hours but it was also an overwhelming experience. Strategic planning and and setting timed individual goals is essential to collaborate during such a sprint. It was interesting to learn how to work on parallel design stages to achieve MVP goals.
Product Development
In a short period of the time, we successfully developed a working application which received great feedback from jurors. We hope to continue to do user tests and develop this product in collaboration with the University to create a simple tools for students to find food.
%20(1)%20(1).png)
