Feed Ma & Pop
An app that facilitates and connects the community to older adults by donating towards their groceries and delivering them safely.
Adobe Jam Design Challenge
ROLE
UX Research, UX writer, UI Designer
YEAR
Fall 2020
TEAM
Porfirio Moreno, Sara Pope
Understanding
This was a two-week sprint where we were challenged to design a mobile app that empowers a specific audience to help improve part of the chain of food collection and distribution.
PROBLEM
We discovered the need to bring to light older adults who faced food insecurity and loneliness during the pandemic.
OPPORTUNITY
How might we help prevent older adults from feeling isolated and insecure about food by connecting them to the community?
SOLUTION
We developed an app that incentivizes volunteers to help their neighbors in need by contributing monetarily towards their groceries and delivering them safely to help improve parts of the supply chain.
Did you feel powerless to help others during the pandemic?
The news was filled with reports of older adults that were struggling to get their food from the grocery store and suffering from isolation due to the lockdown. This spoke to the team and I. We wanted to provide a way to bring this vulnerable group of people to light and enable the community to help somehow.
Design Challenge
How might we help prevent older adults from feeling isolated and insecure about food by connecting them to the community?
User Insight
Financial & Mobility Difficulty
We took into consideration the older adults who are dealing with financial difficulties, and we address that by allowing older adults to contribute towards their groceries with as much they can and allowing a volunteer to pay for the remainder.
Motivating Volunteers
It’s important for volunteers to get rewards for helping their communities. In addition to the donations being tax deductible, they would also get a discount on their groceries every time they helped a Ma or Pop, and whenever a referred friend joined the service.
We are all in this together!
The role of the supermarkets in this journey was to provide their service to help their community and also to donate items that would usually be donated to other organizations to be donated to final customers, but would end up getting expired in the middle of the process.
User Journey
For this design sprint we focused on two user journey’s: Older adults and the volunteer in the community. Before moving on to the UI design, it was important to understand how each of our audiences would interact with Feed Ma&Pop. At this stage we were able to identify key situations in which we could provide the older adults in the community with something special like the “Add a Little Love!” feature, and the”Your Impact” page for the volunteer.
Wireframes
This project was driven to serve a community that is often forgotten. We took that as our priority and during the wireframe designs we paid close attention to accessible design, making sure we addressed visual impairments, among others. We found from our research that older adults feel insecure when providing their personal information on apps, because of that and also for convenience, our user does not have to provide personal information unless purchasing something. We also tried to make sure that they knew where they were in the process at all times.
Me, Sara and Porfirio after a really fun brainstorming session.
Reflections
This project taught me the value of being flexible and understanding in the times that we are currently living. When the team and I struggled to arrive at a solution for this challenge, I proposed to the team that we meet up at a park and have a physically-distant brainstorming session hoping that the change of environment might spark our creativity, and funnily enough that was the day we came up with Feed Ma&Pop.
Because this was a design sprint, we didn’t have time to test it, however, when the usability testing does occur, I would like to explore the name of the app—Although we wanted to show love and care with the name, we realized we are not being considerate of non-binary older adults, and that’s something I would like to test. I would also like to test the app as a whole and get feedback and reiterate.