Everyone deserves a meal
There are moments when access to food can be challenging due to various reasons, and accessing information about food resources shouldn't add to the burden.
With Fueled hope, you no longer have to struggle to discover available options. Our user-friendly app empowers food insecure individuals by offering comprehensive information on all nearby food resources and provides delivery for EBT eligible items
There are moments when access to food can be challenging due to various reasons, and accessing information about food resources shouldn't add to the burden.
With Fueled hope, you no longer have to struggle to discover available options. Our user-friendly app empowers food insecure individuals by offering comprehensive information on all nearby food resources and provides delivery for EBT eligible items
01
Unified platform which has all EBT products and vendors
02
Smart suggestions to address lack of awareness and facilitate accessibility
03
Pay using EBT balance which engages more
food insecure people and improves accessibility
Understanding the challenge
The core of the challenge was "to make food resources accessible to everyone", which is surrounded by a number of tasks. For example, it involves finding stores that offer accept EBT, finding EBT eligible items, transportation or getting to the store and the list can go on. I did not want to jump right into ideating concepts based on assumptions. Instead, I wanted to understand as much of the outfit planning experience as I could in this limited amount of time to make sure my concept was effective and valuable to users.
Research
Interview
Food insecurity is such a sensitive topic that you need to be respectful of people’s boundaries. We decided to first talk to 5 people in our network. In the recruitment, we tried to have people different in age and backgrounds for better generalizability, but it was a bit difficult to do so since people are generally not ready to talk about such sensitive matters.
When preparing the script, I kept the questions open enough for the participant to elaborate on their situation to get their perspective. In this phase, it was especially important for me to be considerate and attentive so that I could spot the pain points but also make sure they were not uncomfortable.
The interviews were conducted in context. The participant and I had a discussion on the topic and went through the issues they were facing in their life.
Environment analysis
Not long before I started this project, I finished Alexander Ostwalder’s book Business model generation and was amazed by the theories behind building a product. Food is one of the basic necessities of life hence i asked myself
how might we leverage people's pain points and existing habit of using mobile phones and online shopping to create a profitable product?
So i conducted a environment analysis to understand this space
Persona Development
I quickly coded the responses from the interviews, secondary research and found that not having a car and lack of information about resources were the main problems everyday and other pain points will be discussed in a later section.
Grocery shopping could be tedious task especially if one doesn’t have a car, it becomes harder to get to the stores which are far away.
Lack of information about the items that are eligible for EBT is something a lot of users struggle with and finding healthier options is usually expensive.
Last but not least, I narrowed my scope to mobile apps because almost 92% of the US population has access to internet and mobile phones. Mobility and portability is key.
Competitive Landscape
Now that I had knowledge about the high and low in the user's emotion when conducting the tasks, I could look at some existing solutions to see how they are handling the issues. I picked the highest rated apps in online grocery delivery and analyzed what they’re doing well as well as their shortcomings.
Major competitors are Instamart, Amazon Fresh, Walmart Grocery, Shipt, Postmates
Except for instacart, the apps all lack provision of ordering from multiple stores. While instacart featured that, it doesn’t notify the user before ordering if the product has to be swapped and none of the apps accept EBT/ Food stamps.
Design
Sketching w/ pen & paper
Entering the design phase, I kept in mind everything I had collected so far - personas, their pain points, and the environment analysis . I started visualizing stuff by roughly sketching out concepts.
I was able to obtain some heuristic feedback from my peers before starting high-fidelity design.
High- Fidelity Design
In this phase, our emphasis was put on visual consistency and how our interface and interaction could serve the core functionalities. Also, it was a little bit of a challenge for us since we had never designed for an AI assistant before
1. Shop from multiple vendors
2. Smart suggestions and track multiple orders
3. Info based AI Assistant
Evaluation and iteration
In this phase, our emphasis was put on visual consistency and how our interface and interaction could serve the core functionalities. Also, it was a little bit of a challenge for us since we had never designed for an AI assistant before
One of the most frequent operations in Fueled Hope is to search for EBT eligible products from different stores. During the evaluation, it was found that users wanted to shop by vendors but would also like to have the option of shop by category.
Therefore, the original design was not supporting this use case because the "stores" button does not provide the user with the option of shop by category. Hence, we had to include two different screens which satisfies the user’s needs.
Apart from the design, we also got feedback from a business perspective, where we found out that food insecure people might not even be able to pay a small delivery fee which lead us to approach out of the box revenue streams such as data colletion.
Future Steps
Flesh Out The Rest Of Functionalities
As the research process showed, shopping and lack of information is crucial to the experience. Our design touched on the issues there but did not fully flesh out them. It would definitely be beneficial to add depth to the AI assistant, smart suggestions and test the concepts out.
Explore other revenue streams
Apart from the design perspective, we got feedback on the business side of the project. We found out that food insecure people might not be able to afford the small delivery fee which lead us to explore other revenue streams such as data collection. Figuring out how to generate revenue without causing privacy concerns to the user and governent would be helpful