This week, we are in the final stages of our project. We were able to successfully launch a survey and card sort activity where we received data pertinent to our research. In our survey, we asked a series of questions to understand the interactions between people and expiring food, shopping, and how they manage it. We used a program called Qualtrics to create our survey. First I sent the survey to the IDM channel in slack and on discord. I hoped to get at least 20 responses from these two platforms but I barely received any responses so I moved to Instagram. I received over 30 responses in just a couple of hours which was great. The data from this survey was extremely useful. Some questions I asked were:
How often do you go shopping for food?
What usually prompts you to go food shopping?
How do you manage excess food that is about to expire?
Do you use any specific methods, systems, apps, or packaging that manages your groceries to prevent food spoilage and waste?
What specific methods, systems, apps or packaging do you use?
Have you heard of an app that connects you to your local community fridges or food pantries?
Have you ever contributed to any local community fridges or food pantries?
Next, I created a card sort activity using Optimal sort to understand the specific behaviors of our users. This activity went very well. I created four buckets with the categories:
When my food is about to expire...
When I go shopping for groceries...
When I have excess food...
When I choose produce...
In addition to these buckets, I created about 17 action cards which the user would use to sort into each bucket that made the most sense to them. Using the data from these two research methods, We were able to create 4 user personas that depicted the various types of actions/behaviors presented. Now that we have this information, the next and final steps are to finalize the research design for our product which includes an external and internal component, and then create a video showcasing how the product works.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IvyF5_78VzuUUobc19uI3h8k02YzimGd8T4juptGPU8/edit?usp=sharing