FeedBoston
Rescuing catered meals in simple to use delivery app
Background
My entire life, I've been a big proponent of food safety and fighting food insecurity in marginalized communities. I volunteered with Feeding South Florida, the southern florida branch of the Feeding America network, for over 300 hours. I had also volunteered in soup kitchens, where meals were hand-made fresh every day by volunteers and permanent head chefs. Soup kitchens would order ingredients from food warehouses such as Feeding South Florida, where they would get delivered early in the morning.
Sometimes, the number of volunteers for soup kitchens isn't enough for the amount of food that needs to be prepared in a given day. What if it was possible to have an app where people and businesses could donate unopened catered (already prepared, ready-to-eat) platters to food banks/warehouses?
I set out to make FeedBoston, an app where users can sign up, take a picture of their unopened platter, and make a listing for a volunteer driver to pick up their platter and deliver it to a food bank or soup kitchen.
User Flows and Storyboarding
The scope of the app was important to the timescale of the project, which was a quick two-week design hackathon. A storyboard was constructed to depict the full concept of the system was in place. This helped narrow down exactly what could be done based on the two-week timeline - which was the donator-side of the app.
After narrowing the scope down, sticky notes and brainstorming by writing down ideas aided in the next step of the process, which was detailing the most important metrics to consider from a food safety point-of-view as well as handling logistics based on the food type. With little time to be had for this project, I opted to create a list of questions to answer, which served as a guideline for the brainstorm session.
- Who will the audience be for this app? Who will be able to log in and use it?
- What can the app do?
- What are some important questions to answer regarding dietary restrictions? What food is NOT allowed?
- What are the best ways to organize orders?
Stretching the possibilities of various user archetypes (bride and groom, business catering, school party, etc..) helped form personas.
Sketches and Low-fi Wireframes
This sample of the sketches completed for the app detailed the main features that needed to be implemented: a photo-taking feature, scheduling, logging information, social posts, etc.
With this, I moved onto making the first quick low-fi prototype.