Greater Pittsburgh Community
Food Bank Locator
A client-based HCI Capstone project:
Redesigning the locator to increase food accessibility
Our client, the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank*, had presented a need to help their customers, who are fighting hunger, locate necessary food resources in an efficient and effective manner. Our overarching task was to design a solution that increases the users’ accessibility to the food locator.
Role UX Research Lead, Interactions
Duration 4-5 months (Jan - May 2020)
Tool Figma, Photoshop
“Food insecurity exists in every county of the U.S.”
Today, there are 37,227,000 people who are food insecure in the United States. With the pandemic, this number would even increase, implying that approximately 54 million people (1 in 6) would experience food insecurity in 2020. (feedingamerica.org)
These food-insecure families often reach out to food banks to find necessary food resources. However, we found the current state of the locator on the food bank website to be inefficient for new users to gain specific information about the resources.
Through research, we also identified our users to be both a non tech-savvy and a tech-savvy audience: 1) food bank clients, and 2) “guides” who help the food bank clients.
Current state: not responsive, lack of clear information hierarchy, offers a bare minimum of info
USER RESEARCH
Because we were unfamiliar with our target audience, we did a lot of on-site research in addition to secondary research. We were interested in learning how clients gain knowledge and access to food resources and how they make decisions to go to certain events.
2 Guide phone calls
10 pantry clients
7 soup kitchens
2 Pantry coordinators
Through exploratory research, we found that most food bank clients were non tech-savvy and thus relied on word of mouth or static information. Also, many had a hard time comparing options and filtering the option that best fit their preference.
70% of food bank clients rely on word of mouth
“I recommend this pantry to everyone I know… I think the internet is intrusive so I don’t like using it.”
68% prefer to choose based on distance/time
“I first followed my friend…I still come…once a month, but it's too packed and has a long waiting time.”
UNDERSTANDING THE AUDIENCE DEEPER
To better understand our target audience, we created three personas that would represent the food bank clients, who are often financially unstable and non tech-savvy:
INSIGHTS
We synthesized all the research patterns and pain points. We then used the key insights to derive main design directions that helped guide us during our ideation.
IDEATION
After reverse-assumption and crazy 8’s activities, we had an ideation session with our client and a virtual speed-dating session to test 5 potential solutions with 11 Food Bank employees.
Although an interactive bus kiosk idea was highly favored, by factoring in different perspectives such as engineering or marketing, we were able to narrow down to a responsive redesign of the website (digital) that generates pamphlets (physical).
LOW FIDELITY TO HIGH FIDELITY
After the feedback from speed-dating, we identified the main screens we wanted to flesh out and adopted a parallel workflow. After each iteration, we asked for feedback from our client and advisor, which we reflected in our designs.
Iterations of the Calendar View
A/B TESTING
We also designed different screens/user flows to conduct A/B testing with our client and 12 food bank employees, focusing on specific details such as:
1. Entry points to different functionalities (find food page, quiz)
2. Information hierarchy and navigation
3. Needs of different user groups (First time users, Repeating website visitors, Guides)
4. User control (i.e. Quiz skip functionality, Switch between map/calendar view, filters)
5. Onboarding quiz questions
We especially paid attention to the wordings (i.e. “take questionnaire” vs “start”), considering our target audience.
Embedded questionnaire vs. Pop-up questionnaire
Food Bank Locator
Many food bank clients currently access the internet through library desktop computers. Guides (those who give help such as Food Bank employees) can also use the desktop version to help clients find specific resources and print physical copies of personalized calendars.
INTERACT HERE or watch the VIDEO DEMO
1. Optimized for clickability & visibility
2. Guiding the users to the right resource options
3. View on map with different filters
4. Print out personalized calendars
Food Bank clients mostly have mobile phones (android), which they can use to access the Food Bank website directly. The website is responsive and thus does not differ much from desktop designs except having finger-friendly designs such as larger buttons.
EVALUATION
We conducted user testing with two Food Bank employees through screen-share of the click-through prototype. Feedback mainly revolved around using more intuitive interactions/icons and adding information related to COVID-19, which we later added to our final design. Other than that, feedback were positive:
“The calendar view is excellent and…the questionnaire will be really helpful to easily find the right option… Very clean and user-friendly!”
“As a food bank employee, so many people come to me to ask two things: where and who to contact… This redesign will really help them find the answers themselves”
EXPLORATIONS: AN INTERACTIVE BUS KIOSK
I, as well as many of the food bank employees, admired the interactive bus kiosk idea. As a physical + digital solution, it well fit the needs of both the non tech-savvy clients and the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank. Although we weren’t able to design the kiosk due to implementation issues, I tried exploring some design options in my personal time.
CHALLENGES AND NEXT STEPS
The biggest open challenge for the project was due to the pandemic. The Food Bank website serves multiple user groups including donors, volunteers and end customers looking for food. Since the end customers are not tech-savvy, it was very difficult for us to reach out to them through Zoom or any online forums, given the pandemic situation. We hope that we could do more user testing with Food Bank clients in the future.
Overall, working with a client was a wonderful learning opportunity. Shout-out to my team for creating countless meeting agendas, working with implementation constraints, and communicating our design ideas with so many people!
