College Project
Bridging the gap to fresh produce for lower-income communities
Duration: 3 months
Team: 4 Members
Methods: Ethnographic Interviews, Stake holder value maping, Competitive Benchmarking, Wireframing, Concept sketching, Journey Mapping, User Testing
Project Overview
FoodStop connects surplus food from university dining halls with lower-income communities through a dual innovative solution
Physical System: Repurposing public transit buses with specialized food compartments to transport surplus food to strategic locations throughout the city
Digital Platform: A mobile application enabling users to locate food stops, track real-time food availability, and contribute to the community through reporting
02 Primary and Secondary Research
We employed several user-centered design methodologies to deeply understand the target users and their needs.
Stakeholder value map
Ethnographic Interviews
Conducted 7 in-depth ethnographic interviews with individuals subsisting on limited means to understand their daily challenges and food access barriers.
Competitive Analysis
Analyzed 12+ nutrition products, producing an opportunity map plotting concepts against health and infrastructure criteria. This helped us identify the optimal High Accessibility & High Health space for our solution.
User Profiles
Developed detailed user profiles based on our research to create representative personas of our target demographic, helping the team maintain focus on real user needs throughout the design process.
03 Research insights
Our user research revealed several critical insights about food access barriers
Financial Trade-offs
Participants often had to choose between essential expenses like rent and purchasing fresh produce.
Processed Food Reliance
Healthier foods are significantly more expensive, leading residents to depend on cheaper, processed alternatives.
Time Constraints and Distance
Residents lack the time to plan and shop for fresh produce due to working multiple jobs and the distance to affordable grocery stores.
Health Problems
The reliance on cheap, processed foods contributes to chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.
Affordability Without Stigma
Users needed access to free or low-cost healthy food options without the stigma often associated with traditional food assistance programs.
Predictability & Planning
Users needed reliable information about food availability to plan their schedules around accessing these resources.
Convenience & Accessibility
Food access points needed to align with existing travel patterns and transportation options to minimize additional time burdens.
05 Iterative Design Process
Initial Concepts
Our initial concepts focused on peer-to-peer food sharing between households. When we presented these wireframes to our peers and users, we received critical feedback highlighting significant limitations including privacy concerns, logistical challenges, high infrastructure costs, and food safety risks.
Back to the Drawing Board: We Reimagined Our Solution Using Existing University Resources and Public Transit
User Testing of Final Solution
During our testing phases, participants indicated that the initial onboarding process was confusing and the method for reporting food levels—using percentages—was not intuitive. We incorporated this feedback by:
Streamlining the onboarding experience with clearer visual affordances
Introducing a photo option for more accurate reporting of remaining food
Simplifying the mental model required to understand the application
Key Learnings
This project transformed my understanding of UX design in several ways
Systems Thinking
I learned to view individual interactions within larger interconnected systems, recognizing how physical infrastructure and digital experiences must work in harmony.
Time Constraints and Distance
Residents lack the time to plan and shop for fresh produce due to working multiple jobs and the distance to affordable grocery stores.
Iterative Refinement
The feedback from user testing dramatically improved our solution, reinforcing that early ideas rarely survive contact with real users without significant adaptation.
Social Impact Design
I gained appreciation for how human-centered design can address fundamental societal challenges while respecting user dignity and autonomy.