How a mobile app can enable community members to buy and sell excess produce from backyard gardens.
Context:
9-Week Project Role: Designer Team: Ari Goodman, Noah Yuen, Parker Landsman, Hannah Tobiason, and Alex Oaten
Can't wait to see it? Check out our prototype here ↗
Background
People with home gardens have a lot of extra produce that goes to waste
According to Ample Harvest, in the US there is “11.5 billion pounds of garden produce that becomes food waste every year.” That’s enough to feed 28 million people a year!
In San Luis Obispo, CA, access to affordable and healthy food is limited
In April of 2022, KSBY reported that in San Luis Obispo, CA “the price of milk is up roughly 12% from a year ago [and] fruits and vegetables increased by 8.5%.” Some shoppers were interviewed and said that they've been forced to pay closer attention to deals and shop around at different stores to try saving money.
Research - 1
We conducted qualitative interviews with 15 potential users
Our interviews covered the following segments: people who garden regularly, farmer’s market vendors, regular produce buyers, and people who want to buy produce but don’t. We asked our interviewees to share about their experiences with gardening and produce.
Gardeners frequently have extra produce that they would like to sell
Gardeners reported feeding extra produce to livestock like chickens, or giving it away to friends.
Farmer’s market vendors are interested but already give away excess to food banks
Some vendors enjoy selling the way they have been, and others are always looking for new ways to sell.
People who buy or would like to buy more produce want a cheaper way to do it
The price of produce keeps going up, and having cheap produce with a community touch is appealing.
Research - 2
We performed SWOT analyses on competitors’ solutions
We compared GardenShare to potential competitors like Harvestly.co (farmer’s market delivery service) and Facebook Marketplace. The SWOT analysis made us confident in our product idea, and gave insight into which features can give us advantages over competitors.
Creating appointments is challenging
Problem Statement
How might we reduce garden waste by connecting community members with excess produce in their area?
Similar to Craigslist or FB Marketplace -- respond, save, comment on listings and create your own listings
Exploratory Map Page
Explore listings near you on an interactive map
Saved Listings Page
Save listings of interest to create your own custom shopping list
Chat and Message System
Easily chat with buyers and sellers about listings
Creating appointments is challenging
Lo-Fi Wireframes
Wireframes + User Flow
We broke down GardenShare into four main screens: the home page (in onboarding), the map, saved listings, and chat.
Testing
We tested on 7 participants with 6 different scenarios
Each participant was given 3 scenarios as a buyer and another 3 as a seller. Observational metrics were timed/tallied during each scenario, and a post-scenario questionnaire was given to collect qualitative data. Click here to see the data.
And here's what we found
Issues that came up:
01
Item listing icons are confusing on the map
02
Ambiguous saved listing icon in the navbar
03
Tap area for accessing profiles too small
Changes we made:
01
Made map icons bigger and more opaque
02
Changed saved items icon from a list icon to a bookmark icon
03
Added click-on-name to access a profile
Design System
An inviting, organic feel
We chose Helvetica for its simplicity and readability. We chose our color scheme to reflect nature, using a lot of green and opting for dark ocean blue for text rather than black.
Prototype
01
A unified home screen
The home screen unifies many of GardenShare’s features. From the home screen, you can view listings, view profiles, message vendors, and create new listings.
Press play ↑
02
Make your own shopping list
The saved listings tab makes it easy for users to organize a list of items they are interested in.
Press play ↑
03
View nearby listings on a map
See listings near you neatly displayed on a map. View listings in map icons to easily save, message, comment, etc. on listings of interest.
Press play ↑
04
Chat with buyers and sellers
We designed our messaging system to be very minimalistic and easily accessible. It is accessed from the navbar, and users can also chat with sellers directly from listings.
Press play ↑
Reflection
We did a great job!
Our project was awarded best project in our section of CSC 484: Human Computer Interaction, and we won some prizes.
I learned a lot about incorporating research and feedback
Since this project was for a computer science class rather than a design class, we were drilled on performing a lot of data-based research and testing. I learned a lot about the ways the design process isn’t totally linear. Sometimes in the testing phase you have to dip back into prototyping, and sometimes you even have to dip back into research. I learned that moving fast and responding to users’ needs as that are newly discovered is vital.
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