When we first started the user research process, we had two goals in our mind: 1. run user tests on the current Leftovers website and 2. conduct user surveys to find out if people (who grow their harvest) would be interested in using an app to donate their excess food.

My team and I created a Google survey with 10 questions and 22 participants completed the survey. Some questions we had on the survey included the following:

How much more food do you grow than you can use (i.e. is there food waste)?

What do you usually do with your excess harvest?

Would you be willing to donate the excess if you had the opportunity?

How comfortable would you be using an app to donate food? (1 = very uncomfortable and 5 = very comfortable?)

We also ran 10 user tests on Leftover's current website to discover the biggest pain points for the users and to understand how to create a better user flow for our Leftovers app design

Google Survey

91%

of people who grow their own food would be willing to donate their excess harvest

63%

felt positively or neutral about using an app to book their donation

86%

were not familiar with "food rescue" organizations

Some of the Google Survey results

Leftovers - quotes from the users

As a starting point, we did some market research on competitors to investigate what kind of food rescue companies are currently out there. We conducted a heuristic evaluation and SWOT analysis for each competitor and gathered the strengths we would want to apply to our mobile app.

1. Second Harvest

(Canadian food rescue company)

Clean Navigation

Consistent Icons

2. Not Far from the Tree

(Toronto fruit picking and sharing service)

Clear Purpose

Clear User Flow

3. Rescuing Leftover Cuisine

(Food rescue Organization in the USA)

Clear Steps to Donate

Nice UI

After gathering insights from our competitive analysis, we shifted our focus to mapping out the user journey and building the user flow. We wanted to understand the steps backyard gardeners would take when donating surplus produce and identify any potential pain points. By visualizing the journey from discovery to donation, we ensured that the process would be seamless, intuitive, and engaging. This step laid the foundation for our app’s structure. helping us design a user flow

We wanted to concentrate on creating clear user flow for donating backyard harvest. Based on the user research, we had discovered that donating process was confusing and since donating food is one of the main tasks you can complete on Leftovers' website, we wanted to ensure that user flow is clear on our App.

Because of time constraints, we moved quickly to our Hi-Fi prototype. We focused on prototyping the Backyard Harvest donation flow and we added step-by-step instructions to address the confusion that our users felt about the process on Leftovers’ original website. Finally, we spread out the donation form across 5 pages to reduce scroll and added indicators to show which step users were on in the process.

We performed usability testing with 5 users. All of our users were able to easily complete the Backyard Harvest donation process, but we did receive feedback that our color scheme and design could be more related to food and harvest (changed from blue to green.

Leftover App - Low-Fi, Mif-Fi, High-Fi

For the Hi-Fi version, we changed the color scheme as per the feedback we had received from the user testing for the Mid-Fi prototypes. We also ensured all the colors followed the WCAG guidelines and are accessible to all the users. We also didn't want to use white (#FFFFFF) for the background or completely black (#000000) for the fonts to avoid too big of a strain on an eye.

We would want to spend time with the stakeholders to review the current site content and perform analytics and based on those findings, we'd improve the user flows and design new features. My team and I find it important to minimize the number of clicks from the home page to important content and make navigation easier. In the future, we'd perform more user tests and make changes based on those findings.