OVERVIEW

01 Objective

Cultivate Natural, Ingenious, and Mindful Food Choices

The project aims to facilitate accessible and healthy eating by prioritizing local information on natural ingredients and nutritious foods, emphasizing local farms and businesses.

02 Problem

Limited accessibility to healthy food information hinders people from making healthy eating choices

Despite a growing health consciousness, food inequality persists in communities with limited resources. The primary barrier to a healthy diet is the perceived high cost of healthy food (46%), along with time constraints (23%) and unfamiliarity with healthy cooking (20%). But, Limited access to affordable healthy food and local information hinders convenient healthy eating choices.

How might we facilitate healthy eating
with telling the story of natural ingredients?

03 Solution

LocaVo: A food app designed to cultivate a sustainable food system that champions mindful connections between people, food, and the land - centered around on local, seasonal ingredients.

The project aims to facilitate accessible and healthy eating by prioritizing local information on natural ingredients and nutritious foods, emphasizing local farms and businesses.

Take a sneak peek at the final prototype——

RESEARCH

01 Research Methods

Identifying what impacts people's eating choices

Social Media & Online community

Semi-structured Interviews

Secondary Research

As the source of ethnographic insights and interviewer recuition

Mainly with 3 people who have different persona

Research papers on food insecurity in the field of behavioral science

02 User Research Insights

Food-ordering Apps do not provide specific information about ingredients.
It is not always about food/eating; some people are out of ethical concerns.

Take a sneak peek at the uers' persona and journey——

03 Secondary Research Insights

Information facilitates source trustworthiness on health, locally produced food, which can drive positive behaviour changes.
Local food eating tended to mediate the perception of sustainability and healthy eating.
Local food system blends the perception of "nature", "community", and "place".

"The key factors motivating the choice were found to be quality, health, locally produced food, animal welfare and convenience. The main constraints to consumers' capability and opportunity to engage in sustainable food shopping were price and time. Our findings suggest that information can be a powerful behaviour change technique if tailored to customers' full shopping journey, including planning, executing, and reflecting on their food shopping. Understanding food shopping as a set of interacting behaviours playing out over time could help to design more effective information-based behaviour change interventions."

_{- Ran, Y., Nilsson Lewis, A., Dawkins, E., Grah, R., Vanhuyse, F., Engström, E., & Lambe, F. (2022). Information as an enabler of sustainable food choices: A behavioural approach to understanding consumer decision-making.}_{Sustainable Production and Consumption}_,₃₁_{, 642-656. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spc.2022.03.026}

Secondary Research Papers:

References:

Ran, Y., Nilsson Lewis, A., Dawkins, E., Grah, R., Vanhuyse, F., Engström, E., & Lambe, F. (2022). Information as an enabler of sustainable food choices: A behavioural approach to understanding consumer decision-making. Sustainable Production and Consumption, 31, 642-656. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spc.2022.03.026
Felicetti, A. M., Volpentesta, A. P., Linzalone, R., & Ammirato, S. (2022). Information Behaviour of Food Consumers: A Systematic Literature Review and a Future Research Agenda. Sustainability, 15(4), 3758. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15043758
Aksakallı Bayraktar, Z., Oral, S., Bulut, S. H., & Bayraktar, Y. (2023). Effect of perception of sustainability in local food experiences on healthy eating tendency: Mediator and moderator effects. Frontiers in Nutrition, 10, 1150277. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2023.1150277
Monterrosa, E. C., Frongillo, E. A., Drewnowski, A., & Vandevijvere, S. (2020). Sociocultural Influences on Food Choices and Implications for Sustainable Healthy Diets. Food and Nutrition Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/0379572120975874
Marrero, A., Tamez, M., Rodríguez-Orengo, J. F., & Mattei, J. (2021). The association between purchasing locally produced food and diet quality among adults in Puerto Rico. Public Health Nutrition, 24(13), 4177-4186. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980020003134
Ruani, M. A., Reiss, M. J., & Kalea, A. Z. (2022). Diet-Nutrition Information Seeking, Source Trustworthiness, and Eating Behavior Changes: An International Web-Based Survey. Nutrients, 15(21), 4515. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15214515
Vrinten, J., Van Royen, K., Pabian, S. et al. Motivations for nutrition information-seeking behavior among Belgian adults: a qualitative study. BMC Public Health22, 2432 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-14851-w
Feagan, R. (2007). The place of food: Mapping out the ‘local’ in local food systems. Progress in Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507073527
Eakin, H., Connors, J.P., Wharton, C. et al. Identifying attributes of food system sustainability: emerging themes and consensus. Agric Hum Values34, 757–773 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9754-8
Caspi, C. E., Sorensen, G., Subramanian, S. V., & Kawachi, I. (2012). The local food environment and diet: A systematic review. Health & Place, 18(5), 1172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2012.05.006
Feagan, R. (2007). The place of food: Mapping out the ‘local’ in local food systems. Progress in Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507073527
Wansink, B., & Sobal, J. (2007). Mindless Eating. Environment and Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916506295573
Lupton, D. (2021). ‘All at the tap of a button’: Mapping the food app landscape. European Journal of Cultural Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494211055732
Zheng, Y., & Cao, D. (2022). Information disorder and organic food purchasing behavior: A moderated mediation model. Frontiers in Nutrition, 9, 939454. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2022.939454
Samad, S., Ahmed, F., Naher, S., Kabir, M. A., Das, A., Amin, S., & Islam, S. M. S. (2022). Smartphone apps for tracking food consumption and recommendations: Evaluating artificial intelligence-based functionalities, features and quality of current apps. Intelligent Systems With Applications, 15, 200103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iswa.2022.200103
Mahdi, S., Buckland, N. J., & Chilcott, J. (2023). Economic and health impacts of the Change4Life Food Scanner app: Findings from a randomized pilot and feasibility study. Frontiers in Nutrition, 10, 1125542. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2023.1125542
Marcela C. C. Bomfim, Sharon I. Kirkpatrick, Lennart E. Nacke, and James R. Wallace. 2020. Food Literacy while Shopping: Motivating Informed Food Purchasing Behaviour with a Situated Gameful App. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376801

Focusing on Information accessibility and sourcing trustworthiness, we transform people's full food journey.

IDEATION

01 Aligning Goals and Needs

Trials on early concept and user flow

While the project is initially for people who are health-conscious or have dietary restrictions, I developed early experiments for concepts and user flows. Some of them are entirely changed during the feedback and review - yeah, it happens a lot.

Early concept on the connections of "Business-Customer"

Review:
- Incentives for user engagement could be offered when bonding through "local" and "sustainable".
- differentiated from other food apps or ordering apps

Early ideas and wireframing on "ingredients-centered" concepts

Reveiw:
- The positioning of the mobile app needs to be clarified and defined.
- If it were an Ordering App, it could not be more appealing to health-conscious users than its competitors.

Early ideas on user flow for "local business"

Review:
- Clear and simple action points for business engagement

Early ideas on backend user flow for "business"

Review:
- Ensure the user guide for business engagement

02 Concept Testing & Modification

Recalibrate the project purpose and concepts

During 3 rounds of feedback and conducting testing, I reflected on the incentives for users. As a result, I decided to scale down the core features and redesign its user flow based on repositioning.

Revising happy flow for users

Review:
- A more intuitive journey for users
- Clearer architecture and touchpoints

Early wireframing and testing

Reveiw:
- The positioning of the mobile app needs to be clarified and defined.
- If it were an Ordering App, it could not be more appealing to health-conscious users than its competitors.

Defining search & filters, page structure & media card

Review:
- Clear and simple action points for business engagement

Trials on the design of "Search"

Review:
- Needs to be clear-structured and avoid confusion

Anatomy on the information structure in main page (restaurant)

Review:
- A more intuitive journey for users
- Clearer architecture and touchpoints

DESIGN SYSTEM

01 Style

After setting clear of information architecture, I started to re-draw UI and buttons, and organize the color scheme and typography.

02 Components

For the whole architecture, I break down each segment and component and implement design systems into pixels, in order to make Media cards or other modules reproducible for larger database.

REFLECTION

01 Learnings

🔍 Market Analysis is critical for a 0-1 product positioning.

With an initial idea to improve on the accessibility of healthy life & food choices, I brainstormed multiple solutions; If being an ordering app or a healthy-diet app, it can become a homogeneous product in the already saturated app sectors.

💞 Uniqueness can be built on culture and community.

Settling the solution on the "Local, seasonal natural produce ingredients," it combines a sense of place, culture, and community. It does not emphasize eating. Instead, it communicates the storytelling of where the food comes from.

💡 Think about the incentives for both users and businesses.

Try to find the junction between user needs and business benefits. It does not have to be profits but has to be values.

📲 Social media is an effective and efficient approach to Online ethnographic research.

To fathom the behaviors, habits, values, motives, and frustrations of the "health-conscious" user group, social media is an ethnographic tool to dig into online communities, effective and efficient to be in serving these research objectives and recruiting interviewees.

02 Next Steps

🎯 Improve the interactiveness of the "My" module.

Currently, the "My" module is about a food map with user-recorded pins. We need to go back to the design process and brainstorm an engaging user journey, making the usage more personal & sustainable.

👥 Think about other groups and improve accessibility.

This APP is not necessarily only for health-conscious users. It is community-focused. Some other groups, like elderly people with special dietary requirements, might need it. Therefore, accessibility and inclusivity are imperative considerations for scaling up.

🧩 Think about designing a GAME for an engaging food story & user journey.

While focusing on "Local, seasonal natural produce ingredients," it might as well be an interactive game to improve the spontaneity for users to find the aimed food, and immersively experience the sense of place, culture, and community.

👩‍🌾 Bring on the power and participation of local suppliers & farmers & food system.

To scale up its impact on local sustainability & economies, we need to find a way to encourage participatory design so as to drive the food system.

LocaVo

OVERVIEW

Explore the Seasonal Bounty

Make "What-you-care" Accessible

Empower local businesses

Log Your Sustainable Exploration

RESEARCH

IDEATION

DESIGN SYSTEM

PROTOTYPES

REFLECTION