This is the project I worked on while finishing my Masters in UX Design in 2020, re-designing the Too Good To Go mobile application experience.
Product Design
User research, prototyping, UI Design
Qualitative data
Sketch prototypes, Invision app
Sketches, low and high-fidelity prototypes
Project presentation
Too Good to Go is an application that allows users to fight food waste and save money by finding cheaper meals or groceries that are going to waste and save them by buying them in a lower price.
Globally, we are wasting 1.3 tons of food a year, which have a huge effect on the carbon footprint. If we could waste less food it would be easier to feed everyone on the planet, use less energy, use less natural resources and reduce greenhouse emissions. The “Too good to go” launched their application in 2016. The company is based in Copenhagen and it is the leading app in Europe for fighting food waste, educating people about food waste and actively doing something for the planet. Their goal is to raise awareness and contribute in any way to “building the global food waste movement”. The aim to educate 50 million people, connect more businesses to the platform, inspire 500 schools and impact regulation is 5 countries. For these reasons I decided to approach it as case study and find if there are any usability problems that if I tackle will help the company achieve their future goals.
I started by performing a basic task for the Too good to go that gave me an idea of the user journey and opportunities to improve the product.
The insights of the walkthrough of the application gave me the basis for constructing a list of semi-structured questions that were divided into 3 tiers: The first Tier is about “Background information”. Softball questions to provide context about their habits, age, what do they do and where they live. The second Tier is about the topic. The questions are related to the food shopping applications and their user experience with them and specifically with the “Too Good to go”, if they are using it. If not, then I have created a task based questionnaire, asking them to do some tasks on the “Too good to go” app and get their views. The third Tier is about exploratory questions around the “Good to go” application and what the participants would like to see more. The users I talked to had not all used the service. Demographically, the users interviewed were in the range of 35 to 45 years old, 2 men and 1 women.
Following the interviews I had a clearer picture of what I wanted to find out about “Too good to go” and about people’s behaviours when purchasing food or groceries online and about their mental model. I created a survey in Survey Monkey and distributed it to my contacts at work and social media platforms. Finally, I gathered data from online customer review to complete the research cycle.
I organised the observations and quotes from the interview into an affinity map to start making sense of the data.
All users mentioned they used TGTG because the prices are low and because they want to help reduce food waste. The overall motivation to use the app was to get food cheaper. Several of the interviewees mentioned they were insecure about buying from new vendors because they didn’t know what they would get for their money. They also didn't find the onboarding very informative. One person said was feeling odd to hand over the phone to a stranger to swipe the code when the food was purchased. Most users said they use service at noon or in the afternoon, typically at work or going home. They open the app to find something to buy nearby and within a short amount of time.
I did a competitive analysis in order to understand if competitors are offering a similar functionality and what are their best selling points and weaknesses.
I have used all the data I have collected from the interviews and reviews in order to create the characteristics of the person(s) that would use the application and that I would have designed based on their needs and features. The following peronas represent, in my opinion, the typical user that is doing online shopping and trying to save money living a more sustainable life.
Following the analysis and synthesis sessions I had a clear idea of the design challenges and the pain points of a user using the “Too good to go” application. The next step was to articulate these challenges into actionable problem statements and transform them into questions using the HMW sentence format. By doing that I can easier create hypotheses to each HMW which I can take in Ideation session, generate design ideas and prioritise what it needs to be built first. I decided to challenge my hypotheses through testing a paper prototype following a scenario that is testing those hypotheses.
Based on the testing results I went back into prototyping a mid/high-fidelity prototype in Sketch. My next steps would be to test the latest prototype using the same scenario and also ask questions about different cases during the interview in order to get feedback about features that are not there and what the users would like to see more. Finally I would design a new, more high-fidelity prototype based on he latest feedback.