Kompost Kingdom
Kompost Kindgom is a mobile app that aims to gamify and incentivize the process of composting in order to help combat food waste. This was the first project I did for the UX Design Bootcamp I completed in 2023.
Overview
Client
Brainstation
Role
UX/UI Designer
Team
5-Person team
Platform
Mobile iOS
Duration
10 days (2023)
The Story
This was the first project my cohort completed during my the UX Diploma I completed at Brainstation. It was an introduction to the Design Thinking process and gave us a taste of how to create an insightful and impactful solution to a real world problem based on users' needs, pain points, motivations and behaviours.
Problem Space
Nearly half of all fruit and vegetables produced globally are wasted each year.
Developed countries waste around 670M tonnes of food per year with the cost of food losses and waste coming to approximately $680B.
Annual consumer waste ranges from 95-115 kg in Europe and North America (per capita).
Initial How Might We Question
How might we help individuals or organizations reduce their food waste using digital technology?
Our Process
🔍
We conducted secondary researched, narrowed down our target demographic, and developed an initial solution for them.
✏️
After conducting user interviews, we completely pivoted based on insights and developed a prototype for a better solution.
💎
We tested the prototype with 5 users and refined the solution based on gathered insights and feedback.
🔍
RESEARCH & IDEATE
3
major sources of food waste:
Retail Businesses
Restaurants and Institutions
Housholds
40-50%
of food waste happens at the consumer level, making households responsible for the largest portion of all food waste.
5
major contributions to household food waste:
Food Spoilage
Over-Preparing
Data Label Confusion
Overbuying
Poor Planning
2nd How Might We Question
"How might we help single-person households optimize planning and buying groceries in order to reduce food waste resulting from surplus?
Initial Solution: Single Serve
✏️
PIVOT & DESIGN
5 user interviews
with participants ages 25-35 living alone in Toronto.
Insight 1
Oftentimes, people living alone don’t meal plan at all. They often do groceries on a day-to-day basis based on what they’re feeling, and they also often eat out.
Insight 2
Even when people living alone do plan their groceries, they often don’t end up using what they’ve planned to use due to laziness and/or lack of time.
Insight 3
Most people end up throwing out fresh produce (e.g. fruits/vegetables) and/or things they’ve bought in bulk but haven’t used (e.g. yogurt).
Insight 4
People dislike the feeling of wasting food because it feels like they’re also wasting money
Final HMW Question
How might we help single-person households manage or prevent leftover food in order to reduce food waste?
Kompost Kingdom
💎
TEST & REFINE
The "How it Works" section was too busy.
Lack of back buttons throughout made it difficult to navigate.
Nav bar icons were confusing.
FINAL SCREENS
TAKEAWAYS
Next Steps
Additional Functionality
We would want to build out additional functionality for the app, including the ability to earn kompoints by having your kompals play with your friends' kompals, as well as by playing educational games with your kompals that teach you more about food waste and other environmental issues.
Social Media Integration
We would like to integrate the app with already existing social media platforms so users can share updates on their kompals, earnings, and savings and spread the word.
Success Measures
To measure success, we sould track the number of app downloads and the number of kompost bIns purchased in each active geography. It would also be good to determine whether or not there is a drop in average food waste in locations with high user activity.
Key Learnings
Don't Get Attached
While it's alright to start ideating solutions early in the process, we learned that it's important to not get too committed to one specific solution. We made the mistake of focusing on one solution too early on, ending up tailoring our approach to the rest of the design process to it, only to later realize the solution didn't necessarily serve our users. Thankfully, we used insights gained from user research to come with a more innovative and impactful solution that addressed their lived realities and problems.
The Imortance of Knowing Your User
User Interviews were really the pivotal piece of the process for this specific project, and showed us how important it is to engage with your users instead of developing a solution based solely on our own discovery research and assumptions. Our user interviews gave us valuable insight that completely changed the trajectory of our solution to be more useful to them.
Be Flexible
We learned that the design process is one of constant learning, experimentation, implementation and iteration. It would've been easy to continue with our original solution idea even though it wasn't necessarily the best for our users, but by being flexible and adaptable, we were able to come up with something much more innovative and useful.
