FOOD WASTE AWARENESS CAMPAIGN
Overview
Platform: Responsive Website
Design Tools: Figma, Sketch, Usability Hub, Pen & Paper
My Role: Visual Designer
A LITTLE BACKGROUND…
Who is the OFWA?
The OFWA stands for the Organization for Food Waste Awareness. The OFWA was created to grapple with one of the biggest problems in America, food waste. Regardless of the efforts of many organizations, 40% of all the food in America doesn’t get eaten. And 96% of that food waste gets thrown into landfills and incinerators rather than composted. That’s roughly $1.5 billion worth of food thrown away every year that could go to one of the families included in the 15% of U.S families that don’t know where their next meal is coming from.
While food waste in the U.S. is a very intimidating problem, it is probably the most realistic issue to tackle as it is mostly a logistics issue. There are plenty of organizations, news coverage, and blogs out there that offer a variety of steps that the public can take to eradicate food waste. The biggest obstacle to tackle is awareness.
Who are the Users?
The OFWA focuses on reaching millennials (ages 18-35) as they are old enough to be making their own food consumption decisions, but young enough to be internet-savvy and comfortable with accessing information online. If the OFWA is successful in making millennials more aware of the global impact of food waste, their efforts to limit food waste will inspire future generations of food consumers.
What is the Problem?
Millennials constantly feel guilty throwing away rotten food in their fridges. They need an easy-to-understand reminder in their daily lives that keeps them aware of the shelf life of perishable foods to help them reduce their food waste habits.
Project Goals
Make food waste awareness more accessible, specifically to people ages 18-35
Create a brand that is friendly, distinctive, and trustworthy in the eyes of the user
DEFINING THE BRAND
Assessing the Competition
In my analysis of other food waste organizations, I found that most food waste sites have very simple, dated UI with:
very little use of color
mostly blue and green color palettes
very little opportunities for user interaction
Using the results of my research, I hypothesized that these sites aren’t very engaging and their lack of user engagement, along with a lack of marketing, is why users aren’t accessing food waste information online.
Finding Inspiration
I began conceptualizing the style for this project by collecting inspiring images online and developing 3 mood boards distinctively different in style.
Mood Board 1
This style was inspired by the high contrast text of newspaper articles and the circular recycling symbol. It utilizes a green and yellow color palette as these colors are commonly found in produce and evoke feelings of growth, energy, and stability in the viewer.
Mood Board 2
This mood board was inspired by the blue and green color palette pattern followed by most food waste organizations’ sites as they inspire feelings of trust, safety, and comfort in the viewer. It focused on an asymmetrical layout to convey a modern aesthetic.
Mood Board 3
This mood board was inspired by nostalgia, minimalism, and upbeat games like Zelda and Animal Crossing. It focuses on a pastel color palette to evoke feelings of calm, whimsy, and optimism in the viewer.
I used the color palette, typography ideas, and layout structures from my mood boards to create 3 style tiles. Each style tile had exact fonts, weights, sizing, colors, and form field stylings that I planned to use on the site mockups. In order to decide which style tile would connect most with users, I conducted a word association test of the style tiles on UsabilityHub, with a sample size of 18.
PREFERENCE TEST RESULTS
Based on the preference test results, it was clear that users preferred the second 2 style tiles to the first style tile. Specifically they liked that the second 2 style tiles were:
Engaging
Clear
Sophisticated
Calm
I hypothesized that the use of white space and sans serif typography lended itself to an engaging and clear aesthetic. With color theory in mind, I assumed that the blue and pastel color palettes inspired feelings of calm and sophistication in the viewer. I planned to utilize these insights in my mockup designs further down the line.
FINDING DIRECTION
Food Waste Apps Don’t Work
As I explored and defined the OFWA’s brand, our user experience team conducted a survey to find out if and how most people access information about food waste and food conservation. The key responses are listed below:
The survey results showed us that:
63% of the respondents do feel bad about food waste when cleaning out their refrigerators.
69% of the respondents do not use any apps or websites to learn more about food waste.
Based on our survey results, we knew that our target audience does want to reduce their food waste, but if we were to design a food waste resource app or grocery companion app, millennials won’t use it.
COVID-19 and Shelter-In-Place
Unfortunately, just as the UX team was conducting its user research to define our persona and problem statement, Coronavirus forced San Francisco County into a shelter in place. Our team struggled to find people to interview for more qualitative data for our research. It was at that point in time that we decided to use market research and educated intuitive decisions rather than user interviews to develop our personas and problem statement.
Our decision to focus on a game-based site was mostly based upon our own educated assumptions. We knew from our survey results that millennials won’t use resource sites or apps and, from our own experience and speaking to other millennials, we assumed that most of our target audience enjoys playing video games, either on consoles, PCs, or mobile phones.
People Love Games
We knew we had to get creative with how we relay food waste information to our target audience. Our team decided to create an online garden simulation game where we could slip in bits of information on food shelf life and best food conservation practices while users were playing the game.
The UX team found that most millennials, play games, whether they are mobile games, board games, or video games. They referenced the popularity of Farmville and Animal Crossing. We hypothesized that if we created a simple farming and gardening simulator for mobile, and if it was as fun or addicting as Farmville or Animal Crossing, we could establish a large user base. Once we have the users’ attention, we could educate them on the impact of global food waste and food conservation in a fun and friendly environment.
UX Team’s Game Sketch
BACK TO SQUARE ONE
The Game Changer
Even though we were committed to the garden simulator game concept, the UX team drafted up two other site concepts for user testing. They wanted to ensure that we were creating a product that would best meet our users’ needs. They drew up sketches of a grocery pocket companion app and included it alongside the garden simulator sketches in a preference test. The test results showed that most users would use a pocket companion app over the gaming app.
We had to face a tough decision: keep pushing onwards with the garden simulator game as we had invested so much time and energy into it or start fresh with an information-driven concept that would better serve the goals of our target audience. After a long zoom meeting, my team and I agreed that if we wanted our product to focus on the user, we would need to move away from the garden simulator. We knew from our survey, however, that our target audience doesn’t go out of their way to find resource apps or sites, so a pocket companion app wouldn’t be effective either.
We decided that the best way to educate our audience effectively would be to create a marketing campaign for the OFWA, specifically for adding shelf life stickers to perishable food packaging. We observed that most food packaging does have expiration date labels, but most are a black text stamp that is small or difficult to read at a glance. We hypothesized that most consumers don’t go out of their way to locate and read these labels at the store and a larger, vivid shelf life sticker would do a better job of drawing their attention.
The campaign would advertise OFWA’s shelf life stickers via sponsored social media ads as most millennials are active on some form of social media, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. As the UI designer, I was tasked with creating the mockups for the OFWA’s marketing campaign site and designing the promoting shelf life stickers for perishable food packaging.
New Design Goals
Develop a simple and effective labeling system for the shelf life of perishable foods.
Create an effective social media marketing campaign for shelf life awareness.
BUILDING THE CAMPAIGN
Visualizing Shelf Life
I knew that the shelf life stickers needed to be vibrant so that they would catch consumers’ attention quickly and that they would need to have simple iconography that could be understood at a quick glance. I decided to use a simple, solid color circle sticker design with a clock and corn vector cutout to symbolize time and produce. I then color coded the stickers into 5 different colors designating their various corresponding shelf lives:
Refining the Message
Once I had a draft of my stickers ready for feedback, I presented my designs to the UX team for review. They pointed out that I should include a link to OFWA’s site on the stickers. If users are only coming into contact with OFWA through the stickers, they might want to learn more information about food waste, outside of knowing the shelf life of the food they are purchasing. I went back to my sketch file and added links to each sticker.
GIVING THE CAMPAIGN A HOME
Following the Research
Once I had designed the stickers and given our audience the option to visit OFWA’s site, it was time to construct the mockups of how the site would look and feel. Using the style tiles as a reference, I knew that users preferred negative space and pastel color palettes.
I utilized card layouts and backgrounds to keep each screen clear and easily digestible. A warm pastel color palette emphasized key cards and accented calls to action. In my research I found that most food waste sites used photos for most of their graphic elements, so I decided that OFWA’s site would focus on illustrations rather than photography in order to stand out from the competition.
Rough Home Screen Mockup
A Quick Detour
I was confident in my designs as they were based in user testing and research, but I still wanted perspective on the choices I had made, so I sent my screens off to design colleagues of mine for review. They noted that while the information presented on each page was clear, the color palette seemed dated and dull for a millennial audience. My logo design was too detailed to be seen and understood when shrunk down and used in the headers and footers of a mobile site.
The feedback I received from my peers was invaluable and I quickly understood that I needed to liven up my designs with a new coat of paint and logo design. I went back to my logo iterations and decided to use my character-based orange logo as I felt it had the vibrant color palette needed to catch millennials’ eyes and a simple form that could be grasped even when shrunk down on a mobile screen.
THE END PRODUCT
Striving for Clarity
The orange logo really popped against the white backgrounds of my mockup screens. I liked the feelings of positivity, energy, and enthusiasm that orange evokes as well. I decided to swap out the dull pastel color palette for a vibrant orange palette that matched OFWA’s new logo. I used purple to accent the orange palette as the two colors contrast each other well and purple made the calls to action pop on each screen. The change of color and logo breathed new life into my mockup designs and gave them a younger, punchier aesthetic that I believe resonates better with a millennial audience.
Roadmap for the Future
Now that I had my UI deliverables finalized for OFWA’s marketing campaign, I needed to develop a guide for all the choices I had made for OFWA’s style: their branding, logo, colors, imagery, typography, iconography, etc. I developed an interactive style guide that could be used by any future UI designers or software developers that might work on future projects for the OFWA.
I hope that any future designers will have an easier journey than I did, but let’s be honest, if you are really committed to human-centered design, the journey will never be easy. At the end of the day, the twists and turns are what make the journey of design interesting and, most importantly, fun.
Lessons Learned
Even in assumption-based designs, you must test for effectiveness and user satisfaction.
While certain UI elements test well on their own, they might not fit in with the overall screen design. Don’t be afraid to retest and iterate at every step of the mockup process.
Communication with your team is key throughout the design process. Solid communication leads to a more cohesive end product that provides a purposeful and pleasurable user experience.