According to the USDA, more than 37 million people in the United States struggle with hunger.
Feeding America is a network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries in America. The opportunity to work with an organization that works to end hunger in America was thrilling to me.
Due to the economies of scale in their supply chain, a donation of 10 cents to Feeding America is equivalent to a meal. This information would become a critical part of the solution we designed.
The solution we designed is a donation experience seamlessly integrated into the app-based food delivery process. With delightful interactive animations and summary pages, users can understand the impact of their donations in their community.
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Our team chose to focus on the rapidly-expanding market of app-based food delivery orders - services like UberEats, Grubhub, and DoorDash. We interviewed stakeholders at Feeding America and users of these apps throughout our design process to evaluate the desirability and feasibility of our solution.
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Our project was divided into a trio of three-week sprints, each building upon the learnings of the previous. We moved from low-fidelity paper prototypes of our solution to digital Figma prototypes, adapting our solution as we learned from users.
Early on, our team struggled with visualizing the impact of donations for users; insights showed that this was a powerful metric, but we weren’t sure how to tell users the story. By testing a variety of low-fidelity ideas, we were able to find out what resonated with users.
We tested low-fidelity prototypes to understand the types of interactions and impact users cared about. We learned that users were motivated by a connection to their community and local food bank.
Our user research led to the three key features of our final solution, shown below. We used animation to add delight without confusion. We focused on empowering advocacy by connecting users to their local food bank.
In our research, we found that users often use promotional categories in delivery apps to narrow their choices and make their options feel less overwhelming. We chose to position Mindful Eats as a similar promotional category, offering users free delivery if they donate with a participating restaurant.
Using a simple animated meal icon for each 10 cent donation added to the order at checkout, we drew attention to the cause without confusing users about what is being donated. Users found this to be a fun and engaging way to see their impact.
Building on the insight that users are more likely to donate when they can see their impact locally, we added a tab allowing users to learn about the campaign, their local food bank, and the donations made by their community.
Build out the corporate lunch order experience to amplify Mindful Eats with larger office meal purchases.
Understand the needs of partner restaurants and food banks to ensure the feasibility of the solution for these stakeholders.
Since the completion of this project in March 2020, Feeding America and UberEats partnered to roll out a donation campaign beginning in June 2020.
Working with Feeding America forced us to consider the viability of our solution as we encountered questions about how our campaign would affect stakeholders, which made our concept stronger and more realistic.
This was my first experience with agile methodology; I learned to make creative decisions on a tight timeline. Iterating in short design sprints resulted in a more thoughtful final product that had undergone multiple iterations.
Presenting to corporate stakeholders helped us hone our idea and its story into something that was concise and compelling. We always began with our user, but adapted the details to connect with our audience.
