Overview

Challenge

Solution

Impacts

My Contribution

Process

Research Methods

Narrowing Down Problem
Space

Key Insights

Design Goals

Inspirations

Ideation Based on
Generative Principles

Competitive Analysis and
Business Argument

Service Design

Concept and Wireframes

Testing and Iteration

Final Design

Reflection

Future Steps

What I Learned

Acknowledgement

InstaDonate

A new donating feature for the Instacart App helping donors deliver food donations to food insecure individuals.

THEME
Food Insecurity and
Access

DURATION
Oct. 2018 - Dec. 2018
8 weeks

ROLE
UX Designer
UX Researcher
Visual Designer

TEAM
Aswati Panicker
Christine Lu
Naomi Lacy

Challenge

Food insecurity is a statewide problem with diverse stakeholders in Indiana. IxDA Indianapolis and Level Up Development consulted with our class to inform design solutions to tackle this intractable problem. From our research, we found food insecure individuals highly rely on the support from organizations like food banks, pantries and shelters. And food donations from individual donors is a big source of organizations' resources. However, both two current major ways of donating individually have some problems:
‍
Deliver donations directly to organizations
● Is so time consuming that keeps many people from donating
● Donations don't fit the organizations' specific need
Participate in offline donating activities
● Exclude people who don't have access to these offline activities

Therefore, we faced these two main challenges:
‍
1. How to make the donating activity more accessible and more convenient for individual donors?
2. How to match the organizations with the donations they really need?

Solution

Through Instacart, a mobile application that provides grocery delivery service, customers could select groceries online and the order is delivered by a personal shopper. On the basis of Instacart, we add a donating section called InstaDonate which help customers deliver their food donations to grocery stores who support food banks/pantries. In this way, donations from individual donors will be collected at grocery stores firstly and then be distributed to local food banks. Leveraging on grocery stories' information of food banks' need and the transportation to food banks through existing supporting programs, donors are able to donate without even leaving home and match their donations with food banks' need.

Click here to view final mock-ups.

Impacts

InstaDonate will have positive impacts on the whole system of main stakeholders:

INDIVIDUAL DONORS


InstaDonate saves donors a lot of time by enabling them to donate in their homes. Donors are also able to recycle their excess food through this service.

FOOD INSECURE PEOPLE AND FOOD BANKS

By making the donation process easier, food banks will receive more donations. The donations will also fit their needs better because donations are distributed by retailers who are already supporting them. More and better donations will allow food banks to provide better help to food insecure individuals.

INSTACART AND RETAILERS


InstaDonate engages both Instacart and retailers with their customers to make social contributions together which will make the society be more aware of the companies' contribution and improve their public image.

My Contribution

Food insecurity is a problem that includes many stakeholders, so each member in our team needed to study different stakeholders individually. I conducted contextual inquiries and interviews with shelter staffs and donors at the church. After that, I collaborated with my teammates to synthesize datas, frame the insights, design principles and design goals together.

After clarifying the design goals, our team conducted brainstorm, wireframing, prototyping ,testing, iteration and presenting in two weeks by the end of the course, and we received positive feedbacks from the clients of this design challenge (IxDA Indy and Level Up Development). However, our design was still very unpolished at that time because of the time limitation.

Therefore, after this course, I stepped back to our framed design principles and design goals and continued to work on this project. I came up with the idea of partnering with Instacart, conducted business analysis, service design, wireframing, testing and iteration in 7 days individually.

Let me show you my design process...

Research Methods

Food Insecurity is a wicked problem involves diverse stakeholders, so we started with visualizing the relationship between different stakeholders and categorizing them.

Because of some concerns about vulnerable population, we are not allowed to interact with food insecure individuals, so we decided to study on organizations which provide help to food insecure people either directly or indirectly. We conducted contextual inquiry with the grocery stores, a church, a food bank and a shelter and interviewed (potential) individual donors, dietitians and volunteers. Through primary research, we tried to learn their food management and donating process in detail, the motivation, impacts of these activities and the obstacles they have doing these works.

Narrowing Down Problem Space

We synthesized the findings and data points through affinity mapping after conducting primary research. We realized the problem space of food insecurity is so broad that we have to narrow it down. From the affinity diagram, we found that a lot of resources in the system had the potential to provide greater value. Therefore, we chose to focus on making better use of existing resources within the system rather than providing extra resources from outside.

Following this principle, we synthesized the datas again and created a framework stressing on the existing food resources and how they are used ineffectively. We realized that the food management of organizations are much decided by the supporting programs they participated in, so it's easier for us to refine the management of individual donors' resources.

Key Insights

After narrowing down the problem space to making better use of individual donors' food resources, we generated Job To Be Done (JTBD) frameworks to develop insights and clarify the needs of related stakeholders.

INDIVIDUAL DONOR

Context: I am busy. I like always staying at home so I tend to store excess foods in my fridge rather than doing grocery shoppings a lot. I am also willing to help food insecure people but I just hate driving or going out for any reasons.

I want to: donate without going out of my home,

So that: I could contribute to the community without spending too much extra time or effort on it.
FOOD BANKS/PANTRIES

Context: Our pantry's food has three main sources: funding from the government, donations from other organizations (like churches and grocery stores) and donations delivered by individual donors. The first two sources are stable and based on our need. However, it's always not the case for individual donations.

We want to: have more donations which match our specific need,

So that: we could have more funding left to feed more people with healthier foods.

Design Goals

DONATION RESOURCES
Collect excess foods from individual donors as food donations.

DONATING PROCESS
Make the donating process time saving and effort saving for individual donors.

DONATION MATCHING
Match the donations from individual donors with the needs of organizations.

Inspirations

After clarifying our design goals, we studied on current ways that tried to achieve similar goals as ours.

Kroger holds a donating activity letting customers purchase the prepared food bags to donate to food banks. Customers could donate and check their grocery orders at the same time.

North Center Church has an information board posting tags of needed foods. The church family will take the tags, buy the foods on the tags and fetch the foods to the church each weekends.

STRENGTHS
● With the information of organizations' needs, Kroger and N.C. Church function as an intermediary between individual donors and the organizations. They organize and distribute the donations for donors to match the needs of food banks.

● They both combine the donating activities with donors' current work flow.
OPPORTUNITIES
● In both cases, donors need to go to physical places to participate in donating activities. How might we make donating activities also involve donors who are not able to or willing to go out of their homes?

● They only provide donors the option of purchasing new foods to donate. How might we make better use of donors' excess food?

Ideation Based on Generative Principles

From our design goals and what we learned from the inspirations, we set three generative principles guiding our ideation:

We should collect donations from individual donors rather than letting them donate to the organizations directly so that we could organize the donations to match the organizations' needs.
The donating activities should happen near or even in the donor's home so that the donors could donate their excess foods easily.

‍
The donating activities should fit in donors' daily workflow as much as possible so that the donors don't need to spend much extra time or effort.

‍

Based on these three generative principles, I focused on individual donors who are not able to or not willing to go out and extracted six typical scenarios in their daily routine near their home. I generated ideas combining donation collection with these scenarios to see how well the process could fit in these scenarios.

I used semantic differential to evaluate the six ideas and finally picked idea 2, combining donation collection with grocery delivery, because:
‍
● Managing foods and distributing them to organizations are already the part of large grocery stores' works.

● Donors are able to donate foods without going out of their homes

Competitive Analysis and Business Argument

After deciding to embed donating activities to grocery delivery service, I chose to leverage on an existing grocery delivery service instead of building a brand new product so that users could start using our service intuitively without switching platforms. To select the platform that matches the profile of our target users, I did competitive analysis on the potential clients.

WHY INSTACART?

Among the top grocery delivery services including Instacart, Google Express, AmazonFresh, Shipt and Peapod, Instacart provides the fastest delivery, and it also delivers perishable foods and has wide service area, but its cost is the highest. Our target users are people who hate leaving their houses, so they would prefer the most inclusive and convenient service rather than the cheapest one.

WHY INSTACART WILL HELP FOOD INSECURE PEOPLE?

Companies increasingly value social good and brand image. All above grocery delivery companies have partnered with charities to feed people. Instacart are also playing their part supporting people and giving back to the communities.

Instacart partnered with ALDI to donate meals to Feeding America to help neighbors in need on #GivingTuesday.

Shipt offered to donate one can of food to Feeding America for every can that was purchased through their app for grocery delivery during their #Get1Give1 campaign.

WHY INSTACART WOULD LIKE TO APPLY OUR PROPOSAL?

Different from existing donating campaigns in which the companies only use their own resources (money and the employee's time and labor), our service will involve customers in the campaign together. In this way, not only Instacart will be much stronger to fight with food insecurity but also there is a greater chance for their efforts to be known by the society.

Service Design

Concept and Wireframes

Testing and Iteration

I tested the low-fi prototypes with 5 Instacart users. The users felt it very convenient to have the shoppers to pick up the donations or select food bags to donate money directly, but there were three details needed to be improved:

POP-UP WINDOW OF DONATION REQUIREMENT
PROBLEM
During the test, four participants ignored the requirement of the donations. They didn’t realize what they wanted to donate is not acceptable until they were required to search their donations and check the expiration date.

ITERATION
I chunked the donation requirement information and present it in the form of a modal window, so that they have to pay attention to this piece of information and would be clear about what can be donated from the beginning.
DONATION INFORMATION INPUT
PROBLEM
During the test, all participants mentioned that searching for their donations and checking the accurate expiration date for providing information is so complex that makes them want to give up the donating process.

ITERATION
I learned more about the donation information management of the organizations and found they only need to know the general category of the foods to balance the nutrition. And they always have to check the accurate expiration date by themselves before giving the foods out. Therefore, I simplified the process by just letting donors select the general categories of their donations from only six options and make sure their foods are not expired very soon with in one page.
PURCHASE MULTIPLE DONATION BAGS
PROBLEM
Participants said they might want to donate several food bags but they were only able to select one bag to donate with current interface.

ITERATION
I added a number selecting bar at the bottom to enable donors to donate more than one bag. The amount of bags and the money they will donate are shown accordingly.

Final Design

InstaDonate is a donating section of the grocery delivery App Instacart. It provides convenient donating experience by (1) picking up food donations from donors' homes and (2) enabling donors to donate money online. These features make the donating activities more accessible, especially for people who are not able or willing to go to certain sites to donate.



INTRODUCTION TO DONATING

Users could enter InstaDonate after they place the order where there are already several steps to go through with current user flow.

User could choose to either donate their excess foods and let shoppers to pick them up or select donation bags to donate money.

If users want to donate foods, there would a pop up window showing the detailed requirements of acceptable foods.


DONATE EXCESS FOODS IN YOUR HOME

Shoppers will pick up the excess food donations from users' home when they deliver the order to users.

To enable the grocery stores and food banks to check and manage the donations, donors need to input some informations of the food donations.

To make the process as simple as possible, InstaDonate only need users to select the general category and the amount of their donations and check their foods will not be expired in three days.


PURCHASE A DONATION BAG ONLINE

Just like the current offline donating activities held by grocery stores, users could donate money by purchasing food bags.

There are three types of donation bags provided in InstaDonate. Donors could view what foods are included in each type and preview how much money they will donate.


RECEIVE REPORT OF YOUR DONATION

Donors will receive a report showing which food bank receive their donations, what the food bank receive and their donating record. They could also share this report to the social media.

Future Steps

Due to the time constraints, our design only focuses on the users' experience of this service. If we have more time to also focus on other stakeholders' sides, we will refine on these two aspects:

How to assign donation orders to available shoppers?

Different Instacart shoppers have different ways and schedule of delivering groceries. Some shoppers go back to the stores and pickup the next order after they finish delivering one, while some other shoppers deliver several orders for one trip and go to home directly after that. So there is a need to design a system assigning donation pickup orders to appropriate shoppers based on their schedule to provide enough time for processing and managing donations.    
How to distribute the donations from individual donors evenly?

Currently, grocery stores distribute the foods to multiple organizations based on the program or campaign they participate in. However, grocery stores’ partners are different from Instacart’s partners, so donations collected through InstaDonate should not be distributed in the same way as the donations from the stores itself. InstaDonate should provide a guidance of how to distribute these donations.

What I Learned

Design is a loop of research, problem framing and ideation.

I always thought about design as a linear process in which research and design happen separately. But by doing this project, I realize it's a loop process in which research, problem framing and ideation are always mixed. We can't decide when ideas appear or when we need to learn more to move forward. When facing a wicked problem like food insecurity, we need to have multiple rounds of problem framing, and we could come up with ideas based on each round which shape what we need to learn for the next step.

The scale of design is limited, but the impact is universal.

There is no single design solution which could solve every problem in a broad and wicked problem space. We generated 114 data points for the affinity diagram in this project, it's really impossible to cover all of them, but some interrelated problems can be alleviated with the same solution. Even though our design could only respond to a limited amount of problems directly, it could have impact on the whole system of this problem. I feel the latter part of design is basically fit the design concept with the current system which is really challenging.

Social good is also business.

Through this project, I realized designing for social good is not contradictory with creating business value. They actually support each other. A stable business model will ensure continuous contribution to the society. A positive brand image also makes the business more sustainable.

Acknowledgement

Heartfelt thanks to IxDA Indianapolis, Level Up Development and Professor Jeffrey Bardzell for organizing this design challenge and providing guidance and feedbacks throughout the project. Many Thanks to Kroger, Bloomington North Center Church, Shalom Community Center, Food bank and the dietitians, Dr. Steven Lalevich, Dr. Angela Babb and Dr. Bobbie H. Saccone for participating in our research. Last but not least, I appreciate the HCI/d Cohort 2020 and my teammates, Aswati Panicker, Christine Lu and Naomi Lacy for their efforts and company throughout this project. I learned so much from them.