LEARNINGS FROM INTERVIEW + SURVEYS 

To better understand the problem space, we conducted a literature review on food insecurities experienced by university students across North America. Then, to explore the problem from a U of T lens, we conducted 8 user interviews and had 14 students participate in an online survey. All participants were undergraduate or graduate students at U of T. The interviews helped us understand students’ eating behaviours, and attitudes towards on-campus food, whereas the anonymous nature of the online survey helped us get insights around sensitive topics such as food insecurity as a result of financial constraints. The major barriers that students faced were:

MAKING SENSE OF THE FINDINGS 

We amalgamated our research findings to curate a persona that reflected the lived experiences of U of T students experiencing food insecurities. Our persona, Samirah, is a stressed out international student from Egypt studying computer science at U of T. Like most of the students we interviewed, Samirah’s tight budget, dietary restrictions (she can only eat halal), unfamiliarity with on-campus food options, and extremely busy schedule causes her to skip meals quite often. To further empathize with our users’ needs, we created an empathy map for Samirah to shed light on what she says, thinks, does, and feels as well as an as-is-scenario to envision what a day in Samirah’s life looks like. 

 Iterative Prototyping

STORYBOARDING + LO-FI PROTOTYPE

It was time to combine the user stories and selected ideas to create wireframes to test them out in the wild. We diverged as a group and individually storyboarded, on paper, what we envisioned the final solution to look like.  We then converged and created a low-fidelity paper prototype (depicted below) based on our individual storyboards.

Task 1 - Onboarding Flow

Task 2 - Pre-ordering a Chicken Quinoa Salad for Lunch On-Campus

LO-FI - GUERILLA TESTING 

To test our assumptions we conducted guerilla testing on our lo-fi prototype with 4 U of T students who frequently purchased food on campus. Some positive findings included:

• Users praised the pre-order feature, and mentioned it would definitely help them save time

• They also liked being able to filter on-campus food joints based on their preferences and dietary restrictions

• None of the students were aware of the U of T bank, but thought it would be a good option for those on a tight budget

We also received valuable feedback which we integrated into our mid-fidelity prototype as discussed below:

MID-FI PROTOTYPE 

The mid-fi prototype was created using Balsamiq. Similar, to the lo-fi prototype the mid-fi has an on-boarding flow as well as a flow for pre-ordering a chicken quinoa salad from a U of T food joint. Both storyboards are presented below:

 Task 1 - Onboarding Flow

Task 2 - Pre-ordering a Chicken Quinoa Salad for Lunch On-Campus

MID-FI - USABILITY TESTING + HEURISTIC EVALUATION

To determine if our mid-fi prototype was usable, and added value to UofT students eating food on campus: 

1. We conducted usability testing with 4 UofT students 

2. Conducted a heuristic evaluation with 2 UX professionals. We asked them to discern the positive & negative usability elements of the prototype with respect to NNG’s Usability Heuristics

The findings and iterations from the heuristic evaluation and usability testing are discussed below:

Reflections

During this project, I learned how to deal with competing business and user needs.

• Consistent user feedback, an agile approach, and building empathy through storytelling allowed us to optimize our product to user needs

• Consultations with experts at various touch points helped us create a feasible and impactful solution that fit within U of T’s current food infrastructure

If I were to do this project again, I would host a participatory design workshop where target users could actively design the solution with us. I would also conduct additional research on food wastage practices on campus to understand how we can leverage them in our current solution.