Food Rescue
Designing Food Rescue, Second Harvest’s online platform for connecting food donors with social service organizations.
Client
Second Harvest
Year
2020
Workshop Facilitation
Information Architecture
User Experience
User Research & Usability Testing
Visual Design and Prototyping
Responsibilities
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Second Harvest is the largest food rescue organization in Canada. Their mission is to capture and redistribute surplus food, reduce waste and avert harmful greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Overview
Unable to keep up with the demands of users on their web portal, Second Harvest wanted an experience that would alleviate the frustrations felt by food donors and nonprofits.
While I designed the web platform to be responsive, the client also wanted a mobile app to increase sign-ups to the platform and allow users to donate or claim a donation from anywhere.
I led 2 design workshops with the Second Harvest stakeholders and my internal team, to learn about the current web portal and understand their goals and frustrations.
Discovery
As Second Harvest staff were regularly in contact with their end users, they were able to share insight on common user pains which informed the personas that I created and referred to throughout the project.
Personas
With this information, I also performed a heuristic analysis of the web app and documented the primary user flows to assess which areas of the platform needed the most improvement.
I focused on the following areas to bring the most impact for the website and mobile app
User Experience Improvements
1. Allowing non-profits to view available donations
In the old platform, non-profits could only learn about new donations through email alerts. As a result, if a donation had been claimed by an organization and other non-profits had no visibility of that from the emails. To address this, I designed a page where non-profits could view all available donations in their area. On mobile, this was only presented as a list view. However, to take advantage of the extra real estate on web, I provided an additional map view.
2. Streamlined Registration
The previous registration process was hampered by irrelevant questions that often confused users. By meeting with stakeholders and pinpointing the crucial information they needed from users at this stage, I edited the copy and reduced the steps to register for donors from 10 to 5 and for non-profits 10 to 7. This reduced the number of support calls to Second Harvest and gave their staff more freedom to tackle other work tasks.
3. Reduce Donation Theft
Previously, non-profits could see the address of a donation before they claimed it. As such, some non-profits would rescue donations other organizations had already claimed, sometimes damaging the relationship between donors and other non-profits in an area. To fix this, I reorganized the donation details to include a map view of the general area of the donation, only revealing the actual address after a non-profit has claimed.
4. System Notifications
As the previous system used email alerts to keep users updated, donors and non-profits often complained of Food Rescue notifications overwhelming their inboxes. As a solution, I designed a notification section for the web and mobile app.
Working in Sketch & Invision, I compiled a design library for web and mobile using Material Design as a reference.
Visual design
With the app launching in March 2020 and the web portal later that year, the Food Rescue platform has helped food-insecure families across the nation endure lockdowns due to COVID-19.
Outcome
6,301,487
Meals provided to communities across Canada
$17,652,228
Worth of food rescued
19,201,909
Pounds of greenhouse gases averted from the atmosphere