Mindful Eats

Triggering donation while ordering delivery food

Overview
Feeding America has created numerous programs and campaigns that get consumers to donate food to those facing hunger. In this project, we partnered with Feeding America to imagine and prototype novel interactions that get people to donate more money in grocery, retail or restaurants environments.
My Contribution
Conducted 3 user interviews. Sketched wireframes. Tested wireframes with 2 users and iterated. Created and iterated prototypes in Figma.
Duration
10 weeks
Tools
Figma, Photoshop, Animate, Illustrator, Open peeps 
Team
Diana Jeong Ro, Kelly McComas
Client
Feeding America: the largest hunger-relief organization in the United States.  
01. ideation
Why delivery app?

We did secondary research of Feeding America, made archives of previous programs, and found out how they addressed problems and get customers involved at the beginning to better understand the design space of grocery, retail, and restaurants.
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We further decided to dig deep into the food delivery app (in this case we chose Uber Eats) to build innovative touchpoints.

02. research
Where can we build
innovations in?

Then we conducted semi-structured interviews with Millennials who used the food delivery app. After talking with 7 millennials including students, freelancers, and young professionals.

We learned that:
  • People use promotional categories to narrow down their options.
  • People are more willing to donate if money is not from their pocket.
  • People are more motivated to donate to the cause they have personal connection with.
  • People hate delivery fees.
After gathering the insights and categorizing them, we decided to respond to:
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How might we make the online donation experience during the app-based food ordering process more compelling & memorable.‍
03. design
      & testing
Reasons behind decisions

Low-fidelity wireframes helped us visualize concepts. We talked with 6 users to test the prototypes and made quick iterations.

We went for the idea of setting a budget before ordering at first, mapping onto the insight that people were more willing to donate if they get reimbursement of their food. But 5 out of 6 users said they wouldn't set a physical budget for their meals. Our instructors also suggested we should focus broader rather than to a specific audience. So we discarded the "Budget" feature and built call outs as a filter for people to choose restaurants.
We explored many ways to make the donation process engaging and innovative. One of them was using real food pictures. But users said they were confused about the picture because they didn't know what they actually donated. And the donating like tipping button made them feel their donations were insignificant.
According to the user testing, people were unwilling to view their donation report or their personal impact. Not feeling to share them on social media either. But they wanted to see their impact as a community.
Then we collaboratively created digital prototypes in Figma and presented them in class. Feedback from peers and instructors helped us further improve our design.  
04. iteration
     & finalize
Harmonize innovations
with current using habits
We combined people’s needs by making Mindful Eats partner with restaurants that provide free delivery if you order featured items. Partner restaurants with callouts will appear at the top category. And people will donate a default 20 cents when they order featured items.
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This touchpoint integrated into people’s using habit of choosing restaurants seamlessly and provided donations with benefits.
Most people have no idea how influential their donation can be. Feeding America can amplify people's donation and even 10 cents contribute to one meal through Feeding America. We built animation of meals to visualize people’s donation and they can play with this animation to donate more.

This feature builds compelling touchpoint by leveraging animation to visualize donations. The insight behind it is people are willing to see how their money will end up with.
Impact page brought people motivation to donate by showing how many meals are donated by the entire area they’re in and how many people they have helped as a community.

This feature map onto the insight that people are motivated to donate to the cause they have personal connection with.
Stakeholders map with business model:
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Deducted delivery fee might be paid by Uber Eats and Uber Eats might charge partner restaurants for part of that fee. The benefits partner restaurants can get is the chance to appear at the top category to gain more orders by partnering.
05. takeaways

01. Design should be consistent. When we decided to leverage a new animation feature to visualize donated meals in Uber Eats, it’s important to get the accent of Uber Eats. The first version of animation though looked great, it couldn’t match the other icons in Uber Eats, so we ultimately replace it.
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‍02. ​Desired, Feasible, and then? We didn’t think about who will pay for the deducted delivery fee until Feeding America raise this question for us. It’s the first time for me to think about the viability from a business perspective. After bringing in a business model of value chain to test our concept, I got a holistic view of our concept. Viability not only looks at profit, it also looks at sustainability to ensure that our concept can contribute to community and society.

03. Storytelling is a powerful tool. To convey your concept successfully, you have to tell an appealing story with your clear concept. How our story flows and how each feature ties back to the insights and feedback speak for our hardworking.
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