Mountains of leftover food in cafeterias costs the company $1,000+ monthly to dispose
How might we...
Reduce or redirect that waste?
Decrease costs associated with disposal?
Innovate on the current cafeteria system?
Braintstorming
Understanding the Problem Area
With our prompt in hand, the team started our initial discovery and research to understand key considerations and opportunities to explore.
We also met with our stakeholder to understand her research and findings in the subject area.
Here's what some participants had to say:
Buffet-Style is complicated with the kitchen feeling pressured to make everything look full at all times.
The kitchen needs to be prioritized in this solution to fit into their workflow.
Hot meals can be donated within a 2-4 hour window in most states.
Workers want quick dinners due to post-work exhaustion inhibiting them from cooking.
Let’s repurpose meals into grab-and-go dinners!
How can we do that?
Competitive Analysis
What can we learn and improve upon?
We took inspiration from the many existing products and features from mobile ordering apps and kitchen management systems.
Breaking it down with sticky notes:
Key Features
Order tracking to ensure users are in-the-loop on the progress of their orders.
Kitchen management system needs to usable in high-stress kitchens.
Track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to record impact for the business.
Planning
What does what and goes where?
We leveraged our findings from the discovery sessions to create features, user flows, and requirements.
We wanted to create a mobile interface for our corporate workers and a tablet kitchen management system for our crew in the kitchen.
Let’s put it all together!
Proposed designs and features
Core Feature
Mobile Ordering Interface
Orders are labeled to indicate whether they have been picked up by the user or are still being prepared in the kitchen.
Any orders not picked up by a specified time will be designated for donation. Users can view recipes directly from the "Orders" screen.
Core Feature
Picking Up Orders
Users would scan their receipts to notify the kitchen that the order has been picked-up. This is also how they would claim their points to make their way up the leaderboard.
Additional Feature
Gamification
Our concept to increase user engagement was to provide points to users depending on the number of items in their order.
Those points would go towards a leaderboard to showcase how much food waste users have redirected in comparison to their peers.
We were also looking into the points being redeemable for company swag.
Core Feature
Kitchen Order Handling
The order view can be easily segmented into current and completed orders for convenient review. Each order is tagged by status, allowing users to quickly assess the order's progress.
A timeline feature indicates the order's position in the kitchen, providing transparency about its status.
Additionally, an expiration timer is activated once food is marked as ready for pickup, ensuring that all items remain safe for consumption upon donation.
Core Feature
KPI Tracking
This screen showcases insights into food waste trends, pick-up rates, and donation rates. This provides the kitchen staff data they can leverage to propose additional solutions and gauge their success with this program.
Takeaways
What did we learn? How could we develop further?
We came out of this experience with...
The skills to leverage auto-layout for rapid-prototyping and consistency.
Aligning on next steps carves the path in a project so don’t be afraid to try something.
The Cargi Hackathon Award for Best Design Prototype!
With more time...
I’d love to focus more on prototyping and applying micro-animations in Figma.
Test the product with kitchen staff and garner feedback on how to better incorporate into their workflows.
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