Yeat It

Yeat It

When assessing the nature of this problem, we began conducting background research. First, we aimed to determine the magnitude of food related waste in downtown Toronto. We proceeded with our research to assess the extent to which food waste is unavoidable and to determine the appropriate methods for its characterization and management.

As per the data provided by the "City of Toronto," it has been revealed that in Toronto, more than 50% of the food wastage occurring in single-family households is preventable. The economic impact of this food is estimated to impose an annual financial burden exceeding $1,300 on the average household (“Food Waste”, 2023). Consequently, we moved on to a comprehensive examination aimed at identifying the root causes of this food wastage and assessing the consequences of sustaining the present levels of waste.

As students, we consider this issue to be highly pertinent, given our current phase of learning how to independently manage our consumption. We acknowledge the significance of meal planning and the optimal utilization of all accessible resources in this process. It is not uncommon for students to inadvertently discard food items that become overlooked or are replaced by purchased meals. The need for support in meal planning and management is evident in our pursuit to reduce wastage.

When constructing our team values, our shared concern for the environment was identified and prioritized when framing our problem. This encouraged us to pursue this issue due to its impact on global warming and waste increase (Amicarelli et al., 2021). A significant amount of wasted food accumulates in landfills while decomposing, releasing methane, a harmful greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere (Levis et al., 2010).

Quick Summary 

A mobile application that can allow all users to reduce food waste and ensure they are following a sustainable lifestyle. 

Lessoned Learned

• We found that more people had issues with the navigation bar than we were expecting. The main issue was that users felt the navigation bar was too big and that the icons could have been laid out differently. For instance, we didn’t think too hard about the placement of the different icons, but it would have made more sense for us to put the home button in the middle instead of the camera.

• We also noticed that users were accidentally missing some of the features that we implemented. This means that the design of the UI may not have been clear enough to the user. This could possibly be remedied with a more robust startup guide or tutorial that walks the user through the features, as the instructions for the testing were purposefully so see if the user could discover the features by themself to begin with. One such example would be the error given when scanning, of which many participants have missed, perhaps due not wanting to deviate from the testing regiment. 

• The participants also made many insightful remarks with regards to possible features that we could implement, such as caloric count, meal planning feature, more data within the sustainability feedback, portion control, etc. These were all features that were considered in the design, and brought up once again in the pilot testing. However due circumstances, mainly the lack of time to implement and relative unfamiliarity with Figma, we could not accommodate every feature in our prototype. 

• Another thing we’ve noticed is that in pursuit of minimalism, we excluded adding in prompts that would be helpful to the user's experience. Adding in pop-ups that reminds the user of certain errors or time sensitive features (like expiration) might help us to prevent this issue of the lack of communication through the interface.

Reflection

Assessment of Usability Testing Process

Successes

1. We got confirmation that we managed to successfully carry over the intuitiveness of our paper prototype to the high-fidelity prototype

2. We gained a lot of insights into UI issues that initially went unnoticed

3. Most participants felt that this was something they could use in their daily lives 

Challenges

1. Finding enough people to test the prototype was a challenge due to time constraints and the availability of the different team members

2. Making sure that participants were testing all the features that we implemented

3. Since we were using Figma, a lot of our functionality had to be simulated without a backend, so our prototype isn’t as close to the final product as we would have liked

Methodology Effectiveness

Overall, our chosen testing methodology was effective. We tested participant interaction by giving them broad unscripted scenarios so that they can test the limitations of the user interface, as well as having hidden tasks to see if the intuitiveness of the UI still held up. Furthermore, our research protocol used a variety of different instruments to collect quantitative and qualitative data. We collected Likert ratings of things like ease of use, effectiveness of the app and whether the user thinks the app is useful. We also collected valuable 

Potential Improvements for Future Studies

Changes in Retrospect

1. If we were to perform the usability testing again, we would try to control what the user does more often so that we could more easily take quantitative measures such as the number of steps taken to complete a task.

2. We would also try to reduce the number of hints that we gave to the user so as to make their response to the prototype less biased. Giving more hints may give some users the impression that the prototype is more intuitive than it actually is. However we would make a robust user onboarding tutorial within the app that would help the user simulate using the app for the first time.

Methodological Modifications

 Consider potential modifications in participant recruitment, data collection methods, or test scenarios.

1. If we were to perform the usability testing again, we would try and recruit participants that we felt more closely aligned with our target audience instead of just reaching out to whoever said yes on the questionnaire from the formative studies

2. As mentioned previously, some pieces of quantitative data were harder to obtain such as counting the number of steps to complete a given task. For next time, we would do some mock testing within our group to try and determine if there are any other relevant pieces of quantitative data that we could find instead

Impact of Additional Resources

Resource Enhancement

If our team had more time and resources, then we would have been able to test out the prototype with more participants. In addition, we’d be able to build out more of the features we wanted such as “Plan A Meal”. Furthermore, our application has a lot of different branching paths a user can take since they can pick from multiple recipes for instance. If we had more time, we’d be able to flesh those parts out and our findings in our usability testing would be more insightful.

Additional Methods

If we were able to program the prototype, it may be useful to track the user’s eyes when they are testing out the prototype. During our usability testing, we noticed that some users would miss certain features or edge cases. Tracking where they are looking on the screen could help give us a better understanding of what parts of the UI grab the user’s attention, and which don’t.