Overview

This project was created as part of BET 350: Customer Experience Design, a course in the University of Waterloo's Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business.

As part of the course, we were tasked with creating a prototype of a product that pertained to a particular social issue, demographic, and technology. What resulted is a product with the aim to reduce waste in restaurants and cafes.

Design Process

Problem

Canada’s recycling system is broken, with a mishmash of rules that may be different between municipalities and private businesses. Small restaurants and cafes are one example of where recycling may be poorly enforced or nonexistent. Furthermore, the youngest generation often struggles with waste sorting. While Waste Wizards attempt to fix the problem, they increase the cognitive load on the user if they are not comprehensive.

Solution

SCANNED, SORTED, SATISFIED.

Sorting your waste and learning about your impact is as simple as scanning a QR code.

GET REWARDED FOR SAVING THE ENVIRONMENT.

Earn EcoPoints to be used toward reusable merchandise from your favourite restaurants. Learn how best to use your new goods!

CELEBRATE YOUR PROGRESS

See how your environmental efforts progress over time, and learn tips to further reduce your footprint.

SKIP THE LINE

Breeze through the long lines and order via the app. Plus, access your disposal information without the need for a QR code!

Scoping

For an exercise in BET 350, we were given three lists covering technologies, social issues, and demographics. Our task was to select one item from each list to generate initial ideas. This gave me the three ideas of Internet of Things, Sustainability, and Small Businesses.

After generating around six sketches corresponding to six ideas, I settled on the idea of a communication service that allows in-person fast food customers to get waste disposal for their order, straight to their table.

SKETCH

ROUGH IDEAS: My initial idea involved in-person dining and the option to have waste disposal information directly sent to an iPad at your table.

Research

Research methods included auto-ethnography, informal conversations, and secondary research. Whenever we relied on the first two methods, we ensured that there was secondary research to support our specific experiences.

This resulted in both an initial customer profile, and a customer journey map that modelled our ideal user: a young individual who is often too busy to cook at home.

CUSTOMER PROFILE

CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP

The customer journey map and customer profile both forced us to look at the issue from both the business and customer perspective.

Ideate

The customer journey map and customer profile both forced us to look at the issue from both the business and customer perspective. Using these insights, we thought of How Might We questions that informed the final design.

QUESTIONS CONSIDERED

1. How might we support businesses who may find our solution costly?

✅ Develop online ordering features to provide another source of revenue, and encourage the sale of merchandise through a rewards system. Sustainability ratings can provide good will to a company.

2. How might we help reduce wait times for customers?

✅ Aforementioned online ordering features will also work here too, as customers will not have to wait in line.

3. How might we reduce the cognitive stress that comes from waste disposal?

✅ Alerts can be used to provide pertinent information on waste disposal, while sustainability ratings can give ease of mind that proper practices are being followed.

Although I did not do a formal competitive analysis of other products, I was inspired by the design language of both UberEats (due to our ordering features) and Too Good to Go (due to our sustainability ethos). This was especially important due to Jakob’s Law, which states that users spend most of their time on other apps, and so your own apps should work the same way as those apps.

LOW FIDELITY WIREFRAMES

WORK IN PROGRESS: My team members created the lower-fidelity wireframes, allowing me to come in and refine the visual design of the application. Changes I made included formalizing and tweaking font choices and colours in a rough branding guide, checking for colour contrast, adding more context and visuals when showcasing one's order, and improving visual hierarchy.

WasteSort