Comeat: a scheduling app for family meals 🧅 

How might we create a solution to reduce food waste by reducing the fatigue associated with coordinating meals among working mothers? 

ROLE  - Individual design project

TIMELINE - 6 Weeks

TOOLS - Figma

Project Overview

Comeat is an all-in-one food management app that provides a way for working mothers to schedule family meals after getting real-time updates that their food is about to spoil.

The inspiration for this came from an onion in the back of my crisper that had started sprouting. At the time, when I showed it to my mother, she had told me to throw it away, sighing exasperatedly as she whinged on about how her food seemed to always be wasted.

And this got me thinking:

1. Why is this happening?
2. Do other working mothers face this same problem?

Before I started, I needed to do some research. I decided some of the key questions to be answered are:

1. What is the research objective?
2. Who is the key customer segment? (Who are we designing for?)
3. What do we already know?
4. What are we unsure about?
5. Who do we need to talk to?
6. What are the other relevant data sources?

Stakeholder Map

People are becoming more interested in food waste in the past few years, possibly from the increase in food waste reduction activities and awareness programmes from NGOs and interest groups that have cropped up recently. Most of them can be grouped into these few categories: Government agencies, NGOs, Food rescue volunteers, Companies dealing with food waste, and Social Enterprises. NEA is one listed government agency responsible for the clean and sustainable environment in Singapore.

A summary of key stakeholders in the food waste space in Singapore can be found below.

Competitor Analysis

When I looked at other apps out there with the goal of reducing food waste like food management apps, I found that most were single-purpose and aimed to either:

• Send reminders when you are low on food by keeping stock of what’s in the fridge and pantry
• Show recipes using the food you already have

However, on the rare occasion that they did multiple things, an avid user of these management apps mentioned that:

“I’ve tried many pantry/recipe apps, and very often they’re good at being one, but kind of crappy (or downright terrible) at the other.”

Therefore, it was important that a food management app with multiple functions can allow users to flow from one step to the other seamlessly.

I looked at some of these apps and found that there was an:

1. App to track, organise and manage the food in your home (NoWaste)
2. App that provides customised “ready-to-cook” recipes (Chefling)
3. App that manages your pantry inventory, your fridge and your shopping (Pantrify)

NoWaste

Key features

• Inventory lists for your freezer, fridge & pantry
• Scan barcodes to add food in seconds
• Share grocery list with family
• Search and find out if you have that particular grocery in stock

Offerings

• Great list design to help you get an overview of your food

Gaps in offerings

• Not user-friendly as scanning feature is wonky, and database does not recognise most items bought
• Not synchronisable across devices

Chefling

Key features

• Recipes for ingredients you have
• Recipes by ingredients based on 30+ special diets, Cuisine, Meal Type and Instant Pot Recipes
• Schedule meal planning weekly

Offerings

• Caters to a wide variety of dietary preferences
• Easy to connect with kitchen appliances (i.e. Thermador and Bosch)

Gaps in offerings

• Not user-friendly as barcode scanner defaults to “Kirkland Large Eggs” instead of an error message when item not in the database is scanned
• Meal plans are non-synchronisable across multiple users

Pantrify

Key features

• Barcode scanner with more than 1 million items database!
• Shareable shopping lists that sync in real time
• Track the price of your items
• Multiple lists to organize whatever (pantry, grocery shopping list, fridge, inventory, …)
• Autofill shopping list with needed products

Offerings

• Allows household members to know what groceries need to be bought in real time
• Less hassle with populating shopping list

Gaps in offerings

• Not user-friendly as there are no setup instructions, leading you to fumble your way through the app
• Not comprehensive enough to take into account situations when scanned items have different expiry dates

Overall, a closer look made me realise that none of the competition had the feature of scheduling upcoming meals with other users although food management involves everyone in the household. The only shareable feature I found would be grocery lists.

Thus, I decided that my app could capitalise on these gaps and provide a way to schedule meals with household members.

User Research

According to Credit Donkey, 70% of primary shoppers in “multi-person households” are females (mothers) and 53% for the unmarried. Furthermore, Pew Research Center also reported that they are most likely to be the usual meal prepper.

When we compare different archetypes of mothers like the stay-at-home and working mother, working mothers are often too busy to keep track of inventory in the fridge and can’t cook every day as they are in the office compared to stay-at-home mothers — leading to more significant food waste from not using the food bought.

To understand the reasons behind food waste among mothers in Singapore, I first delved into local research papers on the topic. Interestingly, I found that…

In Asian households, mothers overbuy food as they believe “household members should have more than enough to eat”. However, they cook less today than their mothers did.

Keeping this at the back of my mind, I moved forward with my user research to understand my target audience more in-depth.

Thus, my HMW statement was:

How might we reduce the food waste produced by working mothers so they won’t feel guilty?

I conducted semi-structured interviews with two working mothers aged 38 to 42 working in the finance sector to get their views of, motivations for, and experiences with food waste.

These are some of the questions I asked:

• Are there any actions you do at home to manage your food waste?
• Tell me about the last time you discovered you had leftover food. What did you do with it?
• Tell me about the last time you discovered you had leftover food. Why did you have it?
• Share with me a typical week in your life when you decide to get food.

The main insight I found was…

Working mothers waste a lot of the food they buy as they get too much and it spoils when everyone is too busy to sit down for family meals.

Thus, this leads to fatigue about the act of cooking which = no cooking.

This insight ties in with the findings from the white paper research as it shows that overbuying food is a key reason for food waste, add to the fact that working mothers — the main decision-maker — get planning fatigue from coordinating the schedules of their kids for family meals so they don’t cook and you have food not being used up! This fatigue can also be seen throughout the supermarket-to-home pipeline when they have to travel to different outlets to find items and even more so when they get home and have to squeeze their food into whatever little space is left in the fridge.

Hence, my revised HMW statement was:

Persona

The working mother 

The working mother, Wanda, is someone who puts her family first and cooks when she wants to eat with her kids. However, she prefers ordering food as it’s more convenient and less stressful since everyone has a different schedule. Mostly, she throws out food that is family-sized and spoils quickly — feeling guilty afterward.

She enjoys getting her kids together so she can use food before it spoils. She wishes for an easy-to-use app that can help her finish her food before it expires as she hates wasting money.

As the person in charge of buying and prepping food, she finds it frustrating that no one uses the food bought from the supermarket before it spoils. She also feels planning fatigue from trying to the coordinate schedules of her family members. She finds it annoying when she comes back from a shopping trip only to find that there is no space in the fridge as she overbuys food for fear it’ll run out. During her grocery runs, she is frustrated when she has to travel to different outlets to buy groceries because they stock different items.

Journey Maps

The As-Is Journey Map shows the actors involved, emotional journey, pain points, and proposed features which are linked with the user centric metrics to look out for.

1. The actors involved are the working mother (the primary user of the app), followed by her kid, husband, and the cashier.
2. The emotional journey shows the peaks and troughs of her emotions during the course of her wasting and subsequently purchasing food again.
3. The pain points were derived from the previous interviews.
4. The proposed features will help with eliminating the user’s painpoints—as listed in the “Stage’s Goal”.

Sitemap

Comeat will have the following tabs:

• Dashboard
• Recipes
• Grocery List
• The Pantry

Dashboard

An overview of the user’s profile, calendar for scheduling and keeping track of upcoming family meals, and receipts — which will be used to quickly upload items bought from the supermarket through a simple snap — will be located under the Dashboard tab. The app will detect the name of the food item, the quantity bought, and the date bought from the receipt to update the pantry and calculate the expiry dates.

A simple summary showing counters like “Money Wasted”, “Amount of food wasted in each food group”, and “Number of family meals” will also be shown at the top of the screen to encourage users to continue with their food-saving habits.

Recipes

As illustrated in the journey map, the user will be prompted to vote for a recipe once a date for a family meal is agreed upon. This is to reduce the aforementioned fatigue working mothers associate with cooking where they have to accommodate the food preferences of all family members. These recipes will be auto-generated by the app according to what’s available in the pantry, with compulsory ingredients being the items expiring first.

There will also be a filter where recipes can be sorted by Meal Type, Diet, Total Time, and Missing one ingredient.

For Missing one ingredient, there will be a pop-up that asks if they want to send that ingredient to the Grocery List, after which they can buy that ingredient at the supermarket and continue with their cooking.

Grocery List

The grocery list will have a simple interface and show the missing ingredients needed to cook a recipe as mentioned above. However, it can also show ingredients that are running low on stock. These ingredients will be sorted by Food Group.

The Pantry

The pantry will show all food items available in the household in real time. When one user updates the pantry, the changes will be reflected in everyone’s phone. The items can be sorted by Food Group and Alphabetical Order. They can also search for ingredients.

Notifications

Notifications will be sent to the user when food is expiring or running low, allowing them to put in their availabilities for when they are able to sit down together for a meal. When clicked on, they will be directed to the corresponding tab.

User Stories & Low-Fi Wireframes

I sketched my wireframes on paper first to quickly explore the user tasks and app design. These are very rough sketches used only as a thinking tool and not for user-testing.

Below is a summary of the user stories and JTBD statements for the low-fi prototypes above:

Design System

I provided a design system for documentation which can be used to ensure all styles and and components are used consistently from the start.

Come Eat app has the feature to find the best time for all family members to get together for a meal. With in-built notifications on when food is going to spoil, it allows for greater awareness of food in the fridge and subsequently, food waste.

Figma file here.

User Testing 

Before I came up with the above prototype, I performed user testing to get fresh opinions on my proposed app.

Research Objectives

Observe how the user behaves and interacts with the prototype and discover how their experience provides opportunities for improving the design in the future. The main areas that are being evaluated include:

• Usability
• Navigation

Metrics: Success Rate

According to nngroup.com, success rate refers to the percentage of tasks that users complete correctly. Simplified success is a very telling statistic as all that is important to the user is if they can complete their target task.

Participants

I recruited two working mothers who have previously used other food management apps as they would be more familiar with the architecture of these apps and provide feedback on whether my prototype is feasible. I also wanted a fresh set of eyes who’ve never interacted with my project before.

Methodology

I performed remote testing on Zoom using my clickthrough hi-fidelity prototype as it was available digitally and would allow my users to interact with and visualise how the navigation of the app would work. Additionally, my users had tight schedules.

Hypotheses

1. Working mothers are able to understand how the scheduling process works
2. Working mothers find the flow of adding missing items from recipes to grocery list smooth
3. Working mothers know how to scan receipts on the app

Scenarios/Tasks

1. You are a working mother whose kids have requested one of their favourite dishes. As you are too busy to arrange a family meal, you want someone or something that can help you with it.
2. You are a working mother who finds it frustrating to go to your fridge every time you want to check whether you have the right ingredients for a recipe. You want a way to instantly tell if it can be made or not.
3. You are a working mother who wants to know what is available in your pantry at all times. Having tried other food management apps, you want something that is actually able to scan receipts without encountering bugs.

Questions Asked

• What is your first impression of this prototype?
• What do you like about it?
• What do you wish can be done
• What feature is the most useful for you? Why?

The Bad + Iterations

1. Users were confused about how to schedule a meal and could not arrange one

• They did not know where to go from the dashboard as there was no clear “Schedule A Meal” indication
• The button at the top right of the calendar was also mistaken for an “Edit” button when it was the button for scheduling meals.
• However, they liked that it was easy-to-use once it was explained to them

2. Users were able to find missing ingredients instantly

• They liked that it appeared at a glance while they were looking at recipes
• They believed the flow of adding missing ingredients from recipes to the grocery list was fuss-free
• However, they would’ve liked the missing ingredients to show up at the top of the grocery list when it is first added

3. Users could scan receipts seamlessly though they were concerned about how the items would be added as there were only two lines of items shown

Other iterations

Other than the scenarios tested above, my users also feedbacked that the design of the family tree was confusing and made them feel like they were in the occult. They also wanted a clear differentiation of the roles within the family. Thus, I modified the family tree to include “role tags”.

Next, they thought the page indicators in the landing page was also confusing as it looked like the bars that show up when you’re entering a OTP. Thus, I removed it.

Reflection

I thoroughly enjoyed this project because I got to put user research tools into action such as user journey mapping and user persona creations. Beyond the research aspect, I loved getting to learn how to do different interaction design components on Figma and familiarise myself a lot more with scrolling mechanics.

References

Wang, M. C., Naidoo, N., Ferzacca, S., Reddy, G., & van Dam, R. M. (2014). The Role of Women in Food Provision and Food Choice Decision-Making in Singapore: A Case Study. Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 53(6), 658–677. https://doi.org/10.1080/03670244.2014.911178