GREENMENU
2021
Helping nutritionists build more sustainable menus
MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE,
ONE MEAL AT A TIME.
Sustainability is a pressing issue today. This project was developed for my Master's program in Interaction Design, and aims to help nutritionists in American schools to develop healthy and sustainable meals for students.
THE PROBLEM
Sustainability is a growing concern in the US, but little is said about how food can have a great impact on the issue. School kids consume non-sustainable foods funded by the government everyday. If every kid on a school that has 500 kids eats one burger, that's the equivalent of wasting up to 9,000,000 gallons of water! Changing their diets would have a huge impact in the environment. With that in mind, I developed GreenMenu, an app that guides nutritionists into creating healthy and more sustainable menus.
THE PROCESS
1. Empathize
The assignment was to create an app for a narrow professional field to help them lead more sustainable jobs. Since I am an advocate for sustainability through my own eating habits, I chose nutritionists as my target audience. I wanted to understand their perception of sustainability in their jobs, so I interviewed nutritionists by creating a google form and asking followers on Instagram to share with anyone they knew that worked in the nutrition field. I found that:
1. 66% know what sustainability is and recognize its importance;
2. 0% think about sustainability when building menus for clients and
3. 100% would be willing to use new technology to help them create more sustainable menus.
From these interviews and research into the US school system, I came up with two different personas and their user journey maps. This process helped me identify pain points that should be acknowledged in my design.
The main pain points were:
2. Define
After sorting through my research I analyzed my findings and created a problem statement that would guide my design:
Mary Jane is a young school nutritionist who needs an app to facilitate creating a sustainable menu because she knows the importance of helping the environment through her job.
3. Ideate
With the personas, pain points, and problem statement in mind, I started to ideate. In my design process, I draw the informational architecture and from that, I develop 4 to 5 quick paper wireframes of each screen. Then I refine the final screens that will become digital.
1. Choosing Ingredients:
To fix this pain point, this screen provides the user with the search bar, filters that show all nutritional needs, and a sort by option to facilitate viewing the ingredients.
Government Funding:
In order to keep funding for free meals, the food’s nutrition needs to be at a standard. To make that easier, all ingredients’ pages provide the nutrition table, as well as a score that encompasses sustainability and nutrition.
Here is how I fixed some of the pain points I found through the research:
4. Low-Fi Prototype and Test
The next step is to prototype these low-fi digital wireframes and test the usability of the app. From the usability test, I was able to identify and fix issues with my initial design.
1. When adding ingredients to the menu, users wished to see a more intuitive screen of all the added ingredients, that could be edited before finalizing the menu and adding them to the main screen. I made changes to how the menu is visualized, showing the sustainability score and giving the opportunity to edit each item.
2. Users gave feedback on choosing the name of the menu before starting to create it and also selecting which school it would belong to, in case the nutritionist works in more than one school. I addressed the visualization of the menu. Instead of showing it on the top corner with the number of items added, I created a tab that can be swiped up to show the menu during the process.
3. The substitutions list would be present only on the ingredient page, but it was suggested that it shows on the menu page as well, upon clicking on each ingredient for easier substitution. When an item is not sustainable/healthy enough, the app signals the need for substitutions. These substitutions are now seen on the menu page as well. The items with a low score have a red circle on the left side to indicate a substitution is needed, and with one click the user can increase the score.
5. Hi-fi Prototype and Test
The final prototype and testing showed great results. The users who participated found the design intuitive, easy to use and said they would be willing to accommodate their routines and try it out. One aspect brought up was the color scheme of the score. Users were left a bit confused, so in the final prototype, that issue was corrected.
Here's the final prototype and app flow:
