3 Designers
2 Product Managers
5 Developers
Figma
Prototyping
Persona Mapping
Product Thinking
Visual Design
User Research
3.5 months
What's Community Fridge KW?
Community Fridge Kitchener-Waterloo is a mutual aid initiative launched in 2020 that aims to improve access to food and reduce waste. They operate with a core team and depend on 200+ different volunteers to fulfill food deliveries and facilitate fridge operations. Local businesses are the main food donors that are able to provide end-of-day food to stockpile the fridge. Food typically goes out in 1-2 hours.
How might we decrease the effort on the core team to schedule donations for Community Fridge KW?
Our Mission
Deliver a tool which empowers the Community Fridge to facilitate a greater number of donation exchanges with less time and manual effort.
Here are the stakeholders involved in this flow:
Constantly trying to coordinate the schedule of food donors and volunteers. Stressed.
Supply all the food to keep the Community Fridge running— absolute legends.
Come time to time to check in on the Community Fridge and help donors with food dropoff.
⚠ This case study will be focused on the donor experience.
current flow
flow with our solution
The small core team at Community Fridge KW wishes to automate some of the donation scheduling processes to improve the efficiency of their operations.
Remove CF Admin from being the middleman between food donors and volunteers
Create one centralized platform for scheduling and remove dependency from social media and email
Begin standardizing the food delivery process in order to increase successfully delivery exchanges
Discovery & Empathy
What are the challenges being faced?
Looking at what else is out there...
We identified the competitors and analyzed their strengths and weaknesses.
After the initial discovery phase and multiple meetings with the client and volunteers, we began synthesizing our insights to create a user persona and flow.
Finalizing the User Flow
⏸️ Dev Review #1 Insights
At this point, we had our first official dev review to get feedback on this flow in regards to technical feasibility within our timeline.
Ideation
We used brainstorming techniques such as Crazy 8s to begin designing the layout of the solution before moving on to official explorations.
To ensure all the requirements of the project are achieved, we divided up this phase of the solution into four product specifications before continuing with design explorations.
Four Product Specifications
1. User Authentication
Key Functionality
2. Home & Onboarding
Key Functionality
3. Scheduling
Key Functionality
4. Pricing Plans
Key Functionality
Design Iterations
After our initial visual explorations, we proceeded to create low-fidelity designs before conducting a second formal developer review.
⏸️ Dev Review #2 Insights
Creating a design system
After implementing the feedback we received in the lo-fidelity models and presenting those to the client, we created a design system before getting started on hi-fidelity designs!
Some Key Components
Clean and informative home page
By introducing a new workflow for donors, they may not be aware of the changes to their current process. We need to find a way to seamlessly educate them on the donation scheduling process and the different pieces of communication.
Quick and easy user authentication
Food donors that go onto this platform must have a registered account so that it can protect the other user's information and protect the platform from spam or misuse.
Scheduling process that is less reliant on admin
Community Fridge Admins currently collect business name, donation description, and drop-off time from local businesses. This information comes from different channels such as social media and email. The conversation takes a lot of coordination, manual effort, and time.
Efficiently update/edit scheduled dropoffs
Food Donors need to edit their information in order to change their proposed drop-off time. Currently, to do so, they would have to communicate with the Community Fridge Admins through a back and fourth process that is very time consuming.
Desktop Wireframes
Project Handoff
The project is still in progress for at least another four months with the next Community Fridge KW team at UW Blueprint. The team will move forward with phase I enhancements and building the volunteer and admin experience.
One of the biggest challenges during this process was organization struggling to get us in contact with donors since they were busy with moving the location of the Fridge, hence usability tests for phase I are still in progress as well!
What did I learn?
My fellow designers on the Community Fridge KW project.
One of the UW Blueprint teams I worked with!
More of the UW Blueprint community <3
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