Mobile Design / User Research /
UW/UX Designathon | Summer 2023
The UW/UX Designathon, hosted by the University of Waterloo, was a 5-hour design sprint focused on creating products that positively impact society.
I conducted research, translated insights into high-fidelity prototypes, and delivered an innovative design that earned us first place among 100+ participants.
Timeline
April 2023
(5 Hours)
Team
2 Designers (Me)
2 Business Strategists
Constraint
Starting from scratch
Short turnaround time
Limited Resources
Impact
1st Place Winner of the UW/UX Designathon
Identifying Our Problem Space
We wanted a solution that was well-focused and impactful, so our team conducted a lightning brainstorming session to identity our potential problem spaces we could explore.
We wanted to evaluate which problem was the most fitting for our team to pursue, so we evaluated each option by 3 factors.
Ultimately, We decided to go with food waste from over-consumption.
Create external accountability for university students to help them recognize and improve their food consumption habits, reducing the impact of unfinished plates on overall food waste?
We wanted to validate our problem and understand our target users’ current pain points, so we conducted both secondary research and user interviews.
The average size of a single restaurant meal has increased by 69% for main dishes and 27% for desserts over this period.
Source: University of Toronto
#foodporn has 296M posts on the #1 photo-sharing app, Instagram.
Source: The Millions
58% of all the food produced across the country is wasted.
Source: Global and Mail
Almost 2.3 million tonnes of edible food is wasted each year - costing Canadians in excess of $21 billion.
Source: City of Toronto
Phone interviews to 4 university students told us their frustrations and what they value:
“I like taking photos of my food and sharing them with my friends, but I’m not sure about sharing my finished plates with people”
“If I don’t finish my plate I’m take it home with me but once it’s in the fridge, I just forget about it.”
Most individuals (69%) feel it's their responsibility to minimize food waste, though they could benefit from a bit of support.
Based on both of our primary and secondary research, we deemed that there was a valid problem at hand.
We targeted 3 main pain points our target users expressed and conducted a solution brainstorming session.
For our MVP, we decided to include 3 key features to show as a proof-of-concept.
From a rough user flow and lo-fi wireframes, we transformed our idea into a working MVP.
We presented these screens (in a working prototype) to a panel of judges after the end of the designathon.
Given the short turnaround ime, our team did not get to flush out all of our ideas in our MVP, so our team revisited this product after the designathon to polish our user flow, design, and interactions.
Design Iteration
Presentation of posting a meal
✅
Functionality — Ability to edit photo
✅
Hierarchy — Prioritizing content over photo preview
✅
Consistency — Home feed padding
Design Iteration
Presentation of homepage
V1
✅
Visual — Cleaner, more uniform interface
✅
UX —Carousel indicator and ability to like and comment
Design Iteration
Presentation of gamification
✅
UX — Ability to add and search for friends
✅
Visual — Use of emoji and illustration to draw familiarity and sense of "fun"
✅
Balance — Effective use of white space and element spacing
Design Iteration
Presentation of private diary
V2
✅
Consistency — Card header, round corners, and layout
✅
UX — Ability to filter calendar by month and year
✅
Contrast — White background against black text to improve readability
Don’t Hold Back, Over-Communicate
This is the first time I, and everyone on my team, has worked with such a short turnaround time, and we turned that anxiety into constant verbal communication, and that was the #1 thing that helped us be efficient. We kept everyone involved in the brainstorming process for as long as possible until we were all aligned, and then we splited up to work on the presentation and prototype separately.
Tell a Story
Focusing on telling a story and inserting anecdotes where necessary made our idea easy to follow and kept the judges engaged throughout our presentation. This is crucial as the greatest idea wouldn’t be great if it left the crowd confused.