University Project: UniFood Application
Support the low income areas in Baltimore city with healthy food
Unifood is a mobile native app that helps corner-store owners store and sell healthy food to their customers. It focuses on helping increase the healthy food available for the communities in food desert areas of Baltimore city by allowing corner store owners to buy nutritious food from wholesalers.
Duration: 2.5 months 02/28/2021 - 05/14/2021 (MM/DD/YYYY)
Role: My role was to research, design and test all UIs related to the project.
Platform: Native app Mobile
Design tools: Axure RP 9, Miro Board
Why corner store owner is the target user of UNIFOOD?
I started the journey with curiosity to know about the food scarcity, food swamp, and the food desert area in Baltimore, USA. Therefore, the search has begun.
Source of Information
Academic and peer-reviewed journals: During research, I found that food deserts have been plaguing the nation for many years and, as a result, have created many food-related insecurities for people. Some factors of limited food supply can be attributed to war, increase in population, global warming, government trading policies, and even poor infrastructure.
It almost always affects lower-income families more than any other group. According to Baltimore City’s Food Environment Council, a food desert is an area where residents lack access and sufficient economic resources to obtain healthy foods. Around 21.8% of Baltimore residents are living under the poverty line.
Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA) provides open and accurate data to the community on various topics, ranging from census data, health-related information, vital signs to arts, healthy food availability index (HFAI), and culture.
John Hopkins (Nutrition Environment Measures Survey in Stores) assesses the nutritional environment in retail stores and grocery and convenience stores.
I researched the background information and the reasons behind the food desert area in Baltimore City from the sources mentioned above. The research information improved my curiosity to know about the corner store, as these stores are the primary source of food in those areas.
Corner store
The bar graph displays the comparative analysis of food retail and locally grown in 14 council districts in Baltimore (2015). The corner store leaves all other food retails behind in terms of the total count.
Source: Baltimore Food Environment Council Districts.pdf
For many low-income neighborhoods, corner stores are the primary food source for low-income residents. The residents are generally unable to travel far distances to obtain healthier food options. The supercenter is not present within a quarter-mile radius from the food desert area.
Currently, corner stores only carry limited amounts of fresh foods as 45% of stores do not have any: they sell sugar-sweetened beverages, Packaged food (high in fat, sodium, and sugar).
Currently, corner stores only carry limited amounts of fresh foods as 45% of stores do not have any: they sell sugar-sweetened beverages, Packaged food (high in fat, sodium, and sugar).
No supermarket alternative within ¼ mile.
The impact
User Analysis
What holds corner store owner from selling healthy food?
Corner store predominance identified the owners as the potential user of the Unifood application. However, they refuse to sell healthy food due to few reasons.
Misperception: corner stores run by Asian or Hispanic owners are less likely to have healthy food and beverage vendors. Many of these store owners had a misperception that consumers would not buy more nutritious foods and therefore would not sell.
Healthy food is on the non-priority list: When corner store owners stock under nutritious foods, suppliers see insufficient demand for healthy food alternatives and do not feel the need to make those items a priority for corner store owners.
Short shelf life: owners are alert about the order quantity due to the short shelf life of fresh fruit and vegetable.
Expensive healthy food: People living in food deserts can't access healthy food for a high price.
How Might We
The information helped form the How Might Wes (HMW).
Cognitive mapping
I created cognitive map along with the HMW. It helped for agenda and cognitive development. Cognitive map also facilitated the visualization of how corner store is connected with all the other major concepts and pain points in food desert area.
The mapping shows how the socio economic challenge impacts the human health and the crime rate. The human health is highly dependent on the food quality that is consumed. The corner store directly and indirectly responsible for human health.
The plan with Unifood application
Establishing a successful business relationship between the wholesalers and the corner store owners can meet healthy food requirements in the food deserts. Corner store owners, wholesalers, and supply-side owners identify the scope of selling healthy food among corner store owners.
The UniFood application is a mobile application that will target food desert areas and help them gain access to fresh and healthy produce. We designed the UniFood app with the intention that it may help to bring fresh foods and other products to areas that do not have easy access to healthy and fresh food options at affordable prices.
Meet wholesaler's minimum order requirement: The store owners need to create group with other other corner store owners. This way they can share the order and the cost.
Short storage life: Sharing the order helps store owners store limited perishable healthy food at store.
We think that our application will be a valuable tool to provide data regularly to BNIA about healthy food availability more frequently. Our user groups will include the corner store owners and wholesalers for now, and we have included the urban farms in our wholesalers' list as there are a good number of urban farms in the city.
Persona
The store owners are pretty excited about the feature of comparing prices among the wholesalers and suppliers. Limited storage capacity encourages sharing the cost of a large order of healthful products with other store owners.
We decided to create personas based on our observations to recognize common goals, needs, and expectations that translated into the heuristics, potential situations, functions, and user flows for our application. These personas, along with our collected research, allowed us to determine the possible scenarios and problems corner store owners and wholesalers could run into that the application would account for.
Thomas is a wholesaler who sells healthy and nutritious food, but his primary concern is the trust and the accountability of their consumers. Wholesalers prefer payment in check and Credit card to know the client's credit history before establishing a business relationship to ensure payment on time. Cash on delivery is not a safe method for drivers and products at inner-city corner stores.
Journey Map
Store owners spend hours commuting to and from the market to buy products. They prefer in-person buying experience for language barrier, they are not always native English speakers. Corner store owners would like to inspect products before purchasing to ensure good quality.
The visual journey map helped visualize the store owner's selling goods purchase experience.
Flow diagram
I documented the sequence of order placement events with this flow diagram. The corner store owner's action communicates the process. I introduced creating and contacting a store owner group to disrupt and challenge the old pattern of single-party transactions.
Paper prototype
Our research decided to focus on three main interconnected tasks for the user to complete. The first task was to successfully sign up with a wholesaler as a corner store owner. The second task was to join a group successfully. The third and final task was to place an order successfully. We started by creating paper sketches of potential ways we could display information. For that, we looked into current mobile applications based on online shopping. We observed apps like Walmart and Amazon to see how effective their layout and interactivity were. The home page allows corner store users to initiate orders directly from wholesalers.
We tested the prototype on users (Miro board). Then Improved paper prototype through several iteration
Multiple users had trouble with completing the task of meeting the minimum amount of money for the order. Users were unsure of how to get to the cart.
Learning from the Paper prototype
•The users go clueless without Call to action button on the screen.
•The wholesaler and Corner Store group concept is new to the users, specially when the relationship is mapped with the online food ordering concept.
•Most of the users lost their way at some point with-out step by step/guided process.
•The users were new to Joint group concept.
Tech prototype
I worked on the technical prototype for the placing order task after a few iterations on the paper prototype. I used Axure RP 9. I worked on the gaps identified during paper prototype testing before testing the digital prototype. System status update through temporary info toast and overlay decreased the cognitive load for users and helped them identify the next possible step.
Usability Testing of Tech prototype
For our technical prototypes, we had a total of 9 Users via Usertesting.com, between the ages of 22-47, with Income between 40k- 80k.
User feedback
Thank you for watching!
