This was a good exercise in becoming aware of what other digital solutions in the same problem space have already attempted and what problems they are trying to solve. As I move through this masters and learn more UX techniques I am often surprised at how useful the exercises turn out to be and how they can help you focus your attention and project in a productive way.
At first glance it may seem that Frigo Magic hardly does anything but in fact it’s an app that focuses itself on the salvaging of food through a recipe manager and does not spend any time trying to help you manage your pantry by itemising it and keeping track of expiration dates like the other apps do. It resulted actually in a much better user experience for me personally as I understood it a lot quicker too. Fridgely is similarly a very focused app - my experience of it was that it was a list manager first and did this in a simple and straightforward manner which was refreshing, it does also have a recipes function tacked on but it doesn’t feel as considered.
A frustration I felt across many of the apps is that they claimed to be able to read barcodes of my food but then actually were unable to identify them, NoWaste even went out of its way to ask you to specify your country so that it could access that database of available food items but then could not recognise my butternut squash. Geography is definitely a consideration that also made itself felt in two of the apps saying that they could analyse your receipt but were not in fact able to - they gave no explanation for this but my deduction is that they can only read receipts in english and these french ones stumped them.
Once I had spent a bit of time analysing these apps and looking back at my persona and problem statements, I confirmed my decision to focus on this problem statement:
<aside> ❓ Paula needs to know what to do with random ingredients / leftovers in her storage so that she can save it from spoiling.
</aside>
With this in mind I focused on how I could improve upon an offering like Frigo Magic’s by bringing in insights gained from my user research. I felt that Frigo Magic was an excellent general recipe suggester but wasn’t so well adapted to helping someone out with one or several random ingredients and while it has the ability to input what you generally have at home you weren’t able to inform it completely of what ingredients were available. I also enjoyed the bar code reading function in several of the other apps and want to emulate it, this however is only effective if it actually works which if this project were being fully developed would be a conversation to have with the engineering team.
I also thought it would be interesting to include some kind of calendar integration as so many of my users mentioned that going away from their house usually meant some food going bad. Something else I would like to include is inspired by the the Kitche app landing page that has a tracker of your food waste habits. I believe this is an effective method in motivating people and would tie into my user goal of wanting to avoid waste wherever possible - where something is quantifiable then you can understand it.
A final frustration that I am hoping to avoid is that all of these apps require you to create an account and apart from Kitche that tracks your habits I found myself frustrated at not understanding why this was necessary - I want my solution to allow you to access the information without an account but that having one will give them a more personalised experience. I want my solution to be a database that can be accessed without faff if that’s where my users head is at at the time of reaching for it.
