A Community Fridge Organizers’ Best Companion
PROJECT OVERVIEW
In New York State, food makes up nearly 18% of all waste. Meanwhile, almost 13% of New Yorkers suffer from food insecurity. This was made even worse by the global pandemic in low income communities. As a result, many community leaders took on the jobs of organizing community fridges to serve these neighborhoods and empower them to take what they need.
However, the time it takes coordinating volunteers and deliveries to these fridges takes up a considerable amount of these organizers’ bandwidth and can be hard to keep up with alongside their other full time commitments. They find it difficult to keep track of the freshness and cleanliness of the items in each fridge without dedicated volunteers or community members.
ROLE
UX Designer
User Research, Interaction & Visual Design, Prototyping & Testing
TOOLS
Figma, Miro, Keynote, Zoom, Google Suite, Otter, Trello
TIMELINE
2 week Sprint
THE CHALLENGE
Our goal was to understand how community fridge organizers manage and maintain the fridges they are responsible for. This includes uncovering the methods they use to recruit and coordinate volunteers, check on the health of their fridge, and connect with fridges in their area.
We came up with the following assumptions to help us ask the right questions in our interviews:
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Current ways to check fridge stock are done manually and time/labor-intensive
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Fridge organizers have no way of anticipating or estimating when future restocks should happen based on rate of depletion
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Community fridges help to combat food waste by redirecting excess food to those in need rather than landfills
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Volunteers are looking for convenient way to schedule their shifts and manage when their fridges need their oversight
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Community fridge managers have little insight on when they need to replenish items in the fridge
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Community fridges have the potential to be centerpieces around which neighborhoods could host community-focused events
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USER RESEARCH
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How might we ensure community organizers have the tools they need to network, coordinating volunteers and maintain community fridge health?
In order to learn about community fridges we sought out their organizers and volunteers as well as community involved individuals to gather most fruitful insights. We wanted to learn all about their organization strategies, frequent challenges, and difficulties they often encounter. The main goal of our user interviews was to capture in-depth data in order help us validate or invalidate our assumptions.
Research Goal:
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Understand how community fridge organizers maintain their fridge stock, connect with other community organizers, while also uncovering any common pain points
USER INTERVIEWS
Before we set out to test, we created a discussion guide that included questions about communication/organization, food accessibility as well as resources/technologies they currently use. By following the discussion guide we were able to focus on the questions specifically targeting organizers and volunteers.
User interview methods:​
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Reaching out directly to community fridge volunteers, organizers and food pantry organizers
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Physically visiting one of the community fridges in the area, and asking to speak to the organizer of the fridge
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
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Community fridge organizers need a formal system for planning and strategizing their day to day
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Community organizers recognize the importance of raising awareness of their community fridge to drive donations and get steady volunteers.
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Community organizers value having a network of other mutual aid and community leaders.
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Fridge organizers depend on volunteers and others to help them maintain the health of the fridge
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We visited a local community fridge to speak to the organizer.
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Luckily we were able to interview the main overseer of that fridge who gave us many great insights and even connected us with more volunteers in order to help us further continue our research process.
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Chelsea Community Fridge
CHELSEA COMMUNITY FRIDGE
WHAT DID WE HEAR FROM FRIDGE ORGANIZERS AND VOLUNTEERS?
QUOTES
"The point of the fridge is not just providing meals, it's also rescuing food and reducing that waste, right that is coming from like all these restaurants”
"I think one of the major issues with a lot of the community fridges is that people can come and take what they want but then how do you know when it's time to refill it"
"I think one of the major issues with a lot of the community fridges is that people can come and take what they want but then how do you know when it's time to refill it"
"Source is always the the biggest challenge as a bid to volunteers. And just trying to manage and making sure you have enough people to serve enough food without knowing exactly how much people are coming"
"The volunteers must have like Google Docs and excels like Google feeds just to kind of manage their their drop offs and things like that.
They also use WhatsApp and other messenger apps to coordinate which can get overwhelming"
"I feel like having an app where we could actually like put things in would be super helpful, if it was something that we could do like across the board but for right now we're just kind of just making stuff work how we can"
"We usually use email and ig outreaches, or sometimes random interactions and just word of mouth. It's very hard to be systematic and there is just no formal way to do things"
SO WHO ARE WE DESIGNING FOR?
PERSONAS
We constructed 2 personas in order to remind us who we are designing for and to make sure we are designing the right thing. Our method of creating these personas came directly from the data we collected from our user interviews.
WHAT DO OUR PRIMARY PERSONA NEED?
JOURNEY MAP
JOURNEY MAP
We created this communication tool based on the data sourced from our persona, Mia. We wanted to really understand our future users and mapped out all possible features/sequences that can be made in the process of community organizers searching for volunteers to contact. We concluded essential highlights & pain points to focus on and improve the user experience.
FEW TAKEAWAYS
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Our users are mainly concerned with finding available volunteers to consistently restock and maintain the community fridges.
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Our users need efficient communication tools all in one platform.
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Our users need a notification system to keep updated with volunteers and the maintenance of the fridges they supervise.
PRIORITIZING FEATURES BASED ON USER NEEDS
IDEATION
With our persona in mind, our team focused heavily on features that fell into the essentials + low-lift-effort such as:
SIGN UP / LOG IN
CALENDAR VIEW OF SHIFTS
FRIDGE STATUS
MAP VIEW
COMMUNITY FEED
PHOTO AND NOTE CHECK INS
WATCH OR FOLLOW A FRIDGE
FRIDGE PROFILE
SHARE BUTTONS
DESIGNING THE RIGHT THING
SKETCHES
We collaborated and developed individual and shared ideations (ideas) for our proposed product during this phase. Our end results included one unique set of sketches we then turned to mobile website screens we developed into a mid-fidelity prototype to test.
Core Features Ideation - maps, calendars, scheduling
Core Features Ideation - map views, fridge profiles, scheduling
Onboarding Screens + Map Views
Core Features Ideation - map views, community feed, organizing shifts
Fridge Feed, Community Feed, Fridge Profiles
Core Features Ideation - calendar views, fridge feed, check-in notes & photos
MID - FIDELITY TO HIGH - FIDELITY TESTING
After finalizing our mid-fidelity designs, it was important for us to have a clickable prototype to test with potential users and get a baseline sense of our designs’ usability. We went through two rounds of usability testing with a total of 11 users. After our first round of testing and feedback we created our hi-fidelity designs.
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Below are the areas of improvement we gathered from the two rounds of testing:
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FEATURE: Coordinate volunteer shifts
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In our high fidelity designs we made sure our users were able to access the calendar from the bottom navigation as well as by clicking on one of the fridges.
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By clicking on any date on the calendar, users are able to see who's scheduled for the shift that day
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Users first clicked on the first fridge in the map list rather than navigating via the bottom navigation menu
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Many did not connect “calendar” with scheduling and instead thought to complete the task through a fridge’s account
FEATURE: See Previous Check-In Notes/Info
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The majority of participants were able to quickly complete the flow via its “happy path”
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Anecdotally, we did hear that the word “feed” was more associated with notification records rather than community posts
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We changed the wording from "feed" to "community" and saw significant improvements in all three metrics when participants were asked to browse community posts and save contact info
Introducing... PLENISH
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More than half task completions were indirect, which meant that there were many misclicks and backtracks
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With the highest average time spent on this task, we also noticed that participants seemed overwhelmed with the number of options presented to them and there was slight confusion about the check in notes
Provide a platform for organizers to “do it all” - from coordinating volunteers and restocks to finding opportunities for community engagement
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Foster a community for neighborhood leaders to help others around them while also receiving the support they need
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Promote awareness of community fridges and their benefits towards mutual aid and reducing food waste
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Efficient and easy-to-use functions that make it easy to use on the go or while mobile
FEATURE: Connect with fellow organizers
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Our team saw major improvements with time on task and direct success when we moved into high-fidelity designs.
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We categorized the information so that the user is able to general information and the latest notes, as well as the volunteers for that fridge
Plenish is an iOS app that gives community fridge organizers a one-stop-shop to coordinate volunteer shifts, connect with community organizers in the area, and check in on the status of their fridge at a glance.
Our mission with Plenish is to provide a hub for organizers to seamlessly integrate the operations side of their community fridge into their busy lives so they can focus on furthering mutual aid efforts in their neighborhoods.
Onboarding Process + Checking Scheduled Shifts
Checking Latest Notes + Volunteer Information
Community Feed + Saving Organizers Information
The second round of usability testing gave us some valuable insights as to where we can iterate on our designs for future testing. Additionally, many participants voiced their request for certain features that we had not previously considered in feature prioritization, such as uploading videos or more detailed event planning capabilities.
As a result, we have a clear idea of our most immediate next steps to have viable designs for a pilot launch as well as stretch goals for how we can potentially incorporate new features in the future given that further user research shows a need for them.
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Short-term goals (pre-launch)
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Further iteration and usability testing of our MVP features
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Kickoff research and discovery for volunteer-centered interfaces
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Resourcing, budget, and timing conversations with tech teams
Long-term goals (post-launch)
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Analyze results and metrics of the pilot program to gauge utilization, engagement, and bugs
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Talk with users regarding future features they would like to see incorporated
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Larger app and platform rollout outside of the pilot audience
Next steps & Recommendations