U C Food
Team 14 – Rotten Tomatoes
Aidan Abregov
Samantha Perez Corona
Eva Kuang
Angela Liang
Gemma Morales
Social Setting
You are a UCSD student who has excess groceries and leftover food and would like to share them with other students. You would also like to utilize campus food resources more and get free food from other students to save money and time on cooking.
Our Mission
“U C Food” is an app that aims to reduce food waste produced on college campuses (focusing on UCSD at this stage) while improving food security of students by facilitating a social food sharing experience.
Prototype Testing
Round 1
Lessons Learned
We had our first round of prototype testing in Week 8 with our classmates. Our prototype had more technical issues related to people not having access when they joined. It is unknown the source of the problem, but we were able to monitor the workspace and use the "SHARE" button to ensure everyone had basic access to edit and create their own donation.
Additional issues were the large number of people confused with what our initial prototype was trying to portray. We felt that it was too open, too arbitrary, and overly-complicated. In round two of prototype testing, we came back with addressed these issues to create a smoother experience.
Round 2
Lessons Learned
Our second prototype session did much better. In this round, we prepared a list of instruction to guide our participants on how prepare and interact with our prototype. At the same time, this document included details about the social setting of our app and roles for participants to play as. Our instructions and presentation slides were sent out in advance through emails and Slack. Fortunately, this set up did decrease the number of participants having technical issues to access our workspace.
In our second round, we simplified the layout of our prototype. We included a plugin feature where participants had to do less manual input of information. This adjustment reduced the amount of confusion we saw in round one. Plus, it created a more straightforward donation process that user could understand. For future works, we will want to have an embedded tutorial of how our app works and what it can offer (e.g. how to set up and look for donations, accept donations, find compost bins, and more).
Final Prototype
Style Guide
Before going into designing our final screens, we created a simple brand style guide for our app. It mainly uses UCSD colors and fonts, with an emphasis on the vibrant yellow (instead of gold) to create a friendly student-oriented image. The guide also includes UI components that help maintain a consistent visual identity for the app.
Figma Screens
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Play with UC Food!
Click through the prototype below to receive the fullest experience
Home Feed
Main screen for viewing available donations
Users open up to a scrollable feed for ongoing donations.
Categorized by hashtags
Divided into perishable, nonperishables, and leftovers
Added Save and Cart feature
Comment Section under each post
Map Feature
Visually view to search for nearby pick-up locations and compost bins
Each pin links to corresponding donation page
Affiliated donation centers and compost areas contain info pages
Dropped pins will begin new donations
Profile Tab
View personal details, manage notifications, and private messages
Check account ratings on donations and pick-up
Notifications for reminders on active posts
Directly message other donors and receivers to communicate
Reflection
Starting our project, we failed to plan for the difficulty in ensuring everyone had equal access to the platform of Trello for our prototype piggyback, had a UCSD-linked account, and had a firm understanding of the role play instructions laid out in the Instructions document we provided. We tried to rectify these issues through preemptive measures of giving tools ahead of time. This did not fix the issue entirely but did reduce the amount of aid needed by participants. The add-on feature of "Activity Fields" eased the process of participants filling out a donation card. This was an improvement made after our first prototype where it had paragraphs and multiple lines of information that left users unsure of what to write. This helped the second set of donors, which included groups 7 and 10 in the second prototype. With hindsight, making a multiple selection option rather than a manual input option was more beneficial in creating and as suggested by one of our participants, embedding notes into a pop-up feature for new users to familiarize themselves with the prototype without having to split attention or leave the webpage containing the prototype.
Team Contributions
Angela Liang
Led on setting up Trello, branding, and designing UI with Figma.
Helped with editing online portfolio and slides.
Gemma Morales
Background research, prototype user research/testing, assisted in a Trello feature, assisted in UI design with Figma, and worked on presentation slides.
Aidan Abregov
Initial Concept, aided in researching value of design, direct troubleshooting with participants in prototypes, contributed to slides and website
Eva Kuang
Sketches on mockups during ideation, UI design, background/user research, portfolio writing and editing
Samantha Perez Corona
Led on setting up Wix and assisted with final UI design. In P1, contributed on Background Research, survey set-up, and presentation slides. In P2, contributed on instruction set-up for prototype sessions. In P3, contributed on final presentation.