Boulder Food Rescue's mission statement says that food insecurity in our communities is not a problem of food production, but is a problem of distribution. This non profit seeks to solve this issue by gleaning unsellable but still edible produce, and bring it off the shelves to those in need. Having four years of vegetable farming experience, I have worked with many gleaners and organizations who rescue food that would otherwise be thrown away, and see a great social value to a service such as this. In order to effectively aid this company, we first looked towards what other organizations were doing that proves effective.

To effectively analyze ways to help the Boulder Food Rescue Robot translate their mission statement into action, it was necessary to conduct competitive and comparative analyses. The organizations we chose each gave great insight on how food is successfully gleaned, and what make different map and delivery applications effective.

Key takeaways were:

- Most popular delivery apps use other map services such as google maps rather than incorporating their own internal map system
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I interviewed two primary people of interest in this study. One participant was an organizer for Food Not Bombs for over 10 years. His insight on how to keep volunteers motivated was keenly helpful. One of the most powerful statements he shared is that “Disguising work as fun is a great way to motivate volunteers.” He also mentioned how he kept volunteers motivated and committed by fostering community through multiple events, strengthening their bonds beyond only Food Not Bombs. He also ran DIY music events where people would connect outside of volunteer time, and ran co-op housing for the university, and helped create immersive communities. This way, members would see one another while volunteering, at the dorms they lived in, and at shows. If someone had dropped out for a couple weeks they would ask the missing participant, “Hey! Where were you for volunteering last week?” and encourage each other to keep helping, and keep the event fun. The other participant I interviewed was a delivery driver through Doordash. His experience with the app was helpful in determining what is valuable to the app based delivery driver. He emphasized the values of autonomy, flexibility, and how important the financial reward was to keep him coming back. This highlighted an interesting need that volunteer leaders face: The need to keep volunteers returning could be fixed, for a price. If volunteers were paid workers, this would help maintain a consistent workforce to take on larger scale projects with solidarity.

To synthesize data from our interview notes, we chose to create an affinity map to see what patterns would arise between the interviews we conducted. The primary patterns that emerged were “I am encouraged when logistics are smooth”, “I find using volunteers as a labor force to be unreliable”, “I am motivated by altruism”, “I am motivated by building community”, “I want incentive to continue helping”, and “I find I can do more when using money as a resource”.

After drawing out these patterns, we set to work creating personas. The two main categories of personas that arose from our research fit into two separate groups: Volunteers & Coordinators. Each role is crucial in ensuring the gleaned produce and food items are picked up, properly delivered, and successfully saved. To make sure our app is providing solutions for both groups of users, we created Cory Chan the coordinator and Violet Vann the volunteer. Cory is primarily inspired by altruism and aims to be well organized, so his organization can successfully impact its desired audience: those with food insecurity. Violet needs increased incentives to stay motivated to volunteer in the long term, as she needs to balance helping others with her own personal needs as a recent college graduate. Once we created their respective problem statements, we entered into ideation on how this app could better support each user in their goals.

Our Food Rescue app will allow coordinators to easily schedule pick up and drop off locations for reclaimed food, which will aid volunteers and coordinators by allowing for more streamlined logistics. Additionally, the app will provide statistical feedback to encourage volunteers to continue helping and improve volunteer retention.

Once the personas had been synthesized from the user interviews we had conducted, we focused on the journey of Violet, our volunteer persona. Our research suggested that while volunteers typically start out enthusiastic, excited to help their community, they soon encounter challenges along the path. The first issue arises after members sign up, when the reality of the logistics come into play. To solve this issue, we will design logistical tools into our product to solve this issue. According to the user interviews we conducted as a team, the more global issue is that over time, volunteers typically feel like they are not appreciated, and eventually withdraw their help. We sketched this out into a Retrospective journey map, to illustrate the current issues of volunteer retention.

As a team, we drafted a Prospective Journey Map, showing the emotional path users would be led on once the Food Rescue app is put in place. Of course, our proposed solution would require future testing, but this is our goal.

The solution we drafted for keeping volunteer' engaged focused on solving the problem of volunteers not feel appreciated. To do so, we planned to incorporate a points system for deliveries, involving experience points, levels, badges, and rewards based on these metrics. Furthermore, volunteers will easily be able to check their stats, creating an easy way for volunteers to see a quantifiable impact they have had on their community. Since deliveries are primarily done by bicycle, this would include miles ridden and pounds of produce delivered, which could be compiled weekly, monthly, yearly, and as a total. This would not only help volunteers feel seen in their efforts, but also help create friendly competition to see who could help the most, and provide donated rewards for volunteer appreciation. As shown in our Prospective Journey Map, this solution encourages long term volunteer growth, gratitude, and retention.

In defining our app, we needed to create a hierarchy that would be easy to navigate, not only for one user type, but for two separate purposes. One for the coordinator role, to effectively schedule volunteers, and another for the volunteer role, to successfully track their schedule, and successfully pick up and deliver donated produce. The information architecture we came up with for the application went through a couple rounds of iterating. The first version had users log in, brought them to a splash page containing potential rewards that could be obtained, and then led them to the home page. Originally, we thought the home page would be the same for each user, but as we got deeper into the project, we realized the home page would need to have slight differences for both the coordinator and the volunteers, as each have a different purpose for using the app. Another issue with our original app map is that it had quaternary navigation menus, which was too deep and detracted from the ease of use we wanted in our application.

We fixed the issue of having quaternary navigation by simplifying our Information Architecture. We opted to have separate home screens for the Volunteers and the Coordinators, so users could get straight to the tools each needed most.

The primary function of the app for Coordinators would be to orchestrate pick ups and drop offs, and allow volunteers to sign up for the task to complete the delivery. The main use of the app for volunteers would be to keep track of their schedule, and to ensure proper navigation to pick up and delivery locations. Since each user group has a separate use of the app, splitting the homepage into a Coordinator facing page and a Volunteer facing page gracefully solved the navigation issue. The next most important feature would be to manage their account to see their stats, gamified points, and rewards. The new architecture makes this much easier for each user type to navigate!

One of the most productive collaborative sprints of this project was hosting a design studio. Our biggest design related challenge as a team was to design the Home Page in a way that suited two the two separate user types. Myself, Josh Cheng, and Justin Nola each contributed a few different elements through sketching. We created a slider to switch between different home page views, which ended up becoming the stats page and scheduling page after ideating upon those designs.

When divvying up the work, Justin expressed interest in designing the map, as he was familiar with map design from his daily usage. Josh expressed interest in designing a gamification aspect for the app, so he tackled that. Since the other members seemed apprehensive to design the calendar section, I was happy to do so. I drew inspiration from existing apps such as the iCal and Google Calendar, to create an in app calendar that was familiar to users and easy to approach.

As a team we finalized our Lo/mid-fi style guide and design system. We decided on using Roboto, as its sans serif style is easy to read. As a team we created and agreed upon components, to make sure we started our lofi prototype utilizing a cohesive design system that could be edited later on.

Once we finished building our lofi prototype, we were able to conduct usability tests. The test provided some great feedback, including confusion about what the splash pages were for, not seeing the buttons in the circular wheels of the logo, a few spacing issues, and a page that was needed for directions upon the volunteers arrival. Another issue was not seeing the instructions of where to pick up and drop off produce in the specific parts of the building that were outlined by Cory’s flow. These instructions were added into future iterations, so volunteers could see the specifics before arriving on site.

Today we had our Scrum meeting to discuss the path ahead. We planned to push every frame into hi-fidelity to finalize each frame. This involved the addition of creating a full color pallet, additional images, and making sure our flow made sense. We originally were going to pull the green used in the Boulder Food Rescue Robot website, but felt it clashed against the predominantly white background. We decided on a green (1A7842) that felt comfortable when in conjunction with other colors.

This morning, we put our thoughts together for the final push. Our HiFi usability tests indicated that the text size was too small, so we updated our body text size from 12 to 14, and restructured our formatting to fit. Future testing would be needed to ensure this body text is large enough, or if we need to increase the minimum size further. Users also reported that they found the images and stats encouraging as well. All in all, this project was a great success. Further research will be required to gauge retention rates, volunteer satisfaction, and ease of use for coordinators to continue developing the app in the future.