Food Cycle
Helping non-profit organizations extend their reach, grow support, and drive impact on the world’s most pressing challenges using design.
Brief
Non-profit organizations juggle countless challenges, from securing donors to staffing their operations, often leading to inefficiencies that divert focus from their core mission. Streamlining these processes can help them maximize impact and dedicate more resources to what truly matters.
With limited time and funds, building a strong online presence often takes a backseat—yet it has the power to streamline operations and amplify impact where it matters most.
Objective
This project aims to create a user-friendly digital solution that helps non-profit organizations streamline essential operations, from donor management to volunteer coordination. By reducing inefficiencies and simplifying workflows, the goal is to free up valuable time and resources, allowing nonprofits to focus more on their core mission and maximize their impact.
Outcome
The solution streamlines operations, making management and volunteer coordination more efficient. By reducing admin work, nonprofits can focus more on their mission, expand their impact, and better serve their communities.
Problem space
Non-profit organizations face tough challenges in a multitude of areas. From finding donor’s, to staffing their hubs, there are many areas that can be inefficient. This leads to a challenging path for the most important parts of their mission… More donations.
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Who is Food Cycle?
FoodCycle uses surplus food as a catalyst to strengthen communities
Volunteers collect perfectly edible food that would otherwise go to waste and turn these ingredients into healthy three-course meals for people at risk of food poverty and social isolation.
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What is the objective?
Synthesize our understanding of the Sprint process into a concise, and compelling presentation along with a site redesign (+ mobile web) that makes it easier for people to donate their time.
Practice working collaboratively with many perspectives from different team members / stakeholders.
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How can we get there?
Using the double diamond design approach, we will perform a usability test to see where there might be opportunity. Once we have our first design we will test it with user’s to see where we can streamline the donation process and make volunteering more seamless.
Interviewing users
We interviewed users to get an understanding of the current volunteer situation. Where is there confusion? Can a typical user sign up to volunteer with ease? These are the things we need to know before we looked for opportunities. Below are our initial findings based off of interviews.
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The Mission.
Very hard to tell exactly what Food Cycle does from the first glance. This was echoed in our user tests as well.
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Signing up.
Sign up layout is overwhelming - too much info in a tight space, making it hard to read.
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Location.
Not clear direction on the map page, takes multiple clicks/screens to get the user to their desired location.
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Information.
The required information screen looks scary for users, and we noticed this can have the effect of pushing people away from signing up.
How might we help busy professionals volunteer their time in order to tackle food waste & give back the community?
Storyboarding
This storyboard shows a quick version of the user’s overall story.
Starting with the idea of wanting to volunteer, and finishing with successfully participating.
This helps to understand our user better and look at their entire journey for an area of opportunity.
Role based persona
Task flow
The task we decided to focus on was getting a user to sign up to volunteer at a location of their choosing.
The current flow is overly complicated and requires 13 steps to successfully sign up and we want to streamline this process to get more volunteers to sign up, easier.
This flow portrays the generalized task of the user either donating their money or their time. The user’s main objective is selecting their preferred time, date and location, then registering their details and confirming their submission with the NGO.
UI Inspiration
After finishing our task flow we looked at UI inspiration for the website design. We knew we wanted a very simple, clean layout and feel for our design. We compiled a group of examples from Behance, Dribbble and Pinterest to look for components and features to help tell our story.
Sketching
Our team used the task flow and UI inspiration boards to figure out the vision for Food Cycle’s redesign. We then started working on a range of concept sketches.
This was a great opportunity to talk through design options on the white board as a team, as well as sketch out some individual components on paper.
Initial prototype
Bringing our concept sketches to life, we developed grayscale digital wireframes and an interactive prototype to refine and test our ideas.
Our main focus was to make the volunteering process easier, and simpler to follow. We kept the main components (learned through testing & interviews) at the forefront, with easily readable and digestible styling for our potential volunteers. Things like ‘how much time does it take’ and requirement details were callouts we wanted front and center, but also easy to understand.
User test 1
Using our initial wireframes, we tested the prototype with real users to gain feedback about any problems in the design and areas that could be improved.
Test results
A quick grid of the test results can show where user’s saw common issues and where we can focus our priorities.
All of the people we tested were able to complete the task but we realized the flow could be improved slightly. There was also a few tweaks we needed to make with the copy.
Given the time constraints, we picked the top seven issues and revised our prototype.
Revisions
We implemented the most pressing tasks based on the user test session findings and updated the prototype.
Below is a sample of some of the revisions we noticed after user tests, and solutions we came up with to help with understanding and user flow.
Revised prototype
Mobile redesign
With mobile being ever important, we created a few of the main screens to see how our design translated to a different size and to help capture a younger audience.
Key Learnings & next steps
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Working together
This project showed us what you can get done in an incredibly tight deadline if you work as a team. As a group we collaborated to understand our problem with in-depth research, interviews, and user mapping. Realizing and harnessing the power of user tests, and continuing to validate our flow and functionality was incredibly important and rewarding.
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Focus on the problem
In trying to truly understand Food Cycle and the problems they face, we then worked to make a more seamless process for donating one’s time with simple, yet effective, website redesign. White-boarding and sketching proved to be an incredibly powerful tool to help ideate our end solution and allow the group to design a better experience, together. Focusing on the problem and re aligning our goals with it helped to find a solution in a short time period.
If you made it all the way here, thank you for taking a look at my design sprint.
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, or would like to chat about my process.