Introduction

In the course of IxD program, we were assigned to participate in the Adobe Creative Jam and for two weeks and design a mobile App using Adobe XD with the following prompt:

Design a mobile phone app that empowers a specific audience to help improve part of the chain of food collection and distribution. The app must provide a mode of measurement or service to a single or multiple systems. The audience may be a party involved in some way in the supply chain, or a messenger of public service around the severity of the insecurity issue of your choosing.

Problem

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) reaches 38 million people nationwide in 2019 alone. While SNAP participants are given an EBT card to purchase food at the grocery, we found many participants or eligible people carry shameful feelings to use the EBT card or face the difficulty of going to stores. Moreover, some people don't use the EBT card in not an effective way to manage a balanced diet because of a lack of motivation or knowledge for Nutritious Foods

Solution

Snap Market App is an e-commerce platform that connects SNAP participants to the local community and nutritious foods. It offers EBT cards to purchase, options to pick up or deliver local groceries, and information about nutritious facts. It is designed to create an uplifting feeling by supporting the local community. The online platform helps users who have difficulty going to stores. Lastly, giving information on nutritional facts increases the awareness of their eating habits.

What’s Food Insecurity?

We started the research by understanding what is Food Insecurity, who is suffering, and what are the current helps out there.

The USDA defines food insecurity as the lack of access, at times, to enough food for all household members. [1]

Who is affected by Food Insecurity?

According to USDA [3], rates of food insecurity were considerably higher for:

• Low-income households

• African American households

• Hispanic households

What is SNAP?

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest government benefit program that helps low-income households with nutrition assistance. As its benefits, it provides an Electronic Benefits Transfer card (EBT card) for individuals or families to purchase grocery foods. [4] In 2015, SNAP lifted 4.6 million Americans above the poverty line, including 2 million children and 366,000 seniors. [5]

Target Audience Research

We wondered if we could improve the experience using SNAP for the users. We started to research further on SNAP-eligible individuals to find out their needs.

As you can see in the pie chart below [6], the majority of SNAP participants are:

User Users

From the research, we establish the user needs, and I created the Persona Panels below to illustrate the target audience, their pain points, and needs.

NEED 1: Free from shame, positive reason to join SNAP

While we study SNAP participants, we also noticed the fact that there are many people who are eligible to join SNAP but they don’t participate.

Elena David, Social Connectedness Fellow in 2017, points out FEELING OF SHAME towards getting benefits in her research paper, “Food Insecurity in America: Putting Dignity and Respect at the Forefront of Food Aid” [7]:

NEED 2: A system that guides children to take a balanced diet

The majorly of SNAP benefit goes to Children, and children cannot thrive if they are hungry. Besides getting foods to children, providing a balanced diet is extremely important for children’s development [10].

NEED 3: Ability to get grocery safe and ease

Since the pandemic hit, many reports show that single parents are highly stressed about balancing remote work, caring for their kids, and running errands to keep the house going.

Not every single parent can get help every day. Some people are judged by bringing their kid to a grocery store from their community [11].

NEED 4: Easy access to grocery

Research shows that grocery shopping is not an easy task for many senior citizens and people with disabilities. There is not only the issue of accessibility. Seniors with arthritis may also find it is challenging to move around or to reach items. Reaching items are difficult for someone with wheelchairs as well. Most grocery stores’ shelves are tall that they can not reach half products [13].

Seeking a new opportunities

We wondered if online shopping would solve some users’ problems such as the difficulty to access grocery safe & easy. We searched EBT cards use at farmers’ markets, but we did not see online shopping platforms. We also wanted to ensure that we encourage fresh & nutritious foods.

User Flow

Creating this flow together ensured us to be on the same page. It helped us clarify our vision for the user experience and what screens we need to design for our MVP prototype.

Wireframe

I created wireframes for the shopping experience portion, from the individual shop page screen through the individual item page. While I was making the wireframes, I wrote down questions and notes in my sketchbook to bring up to the team discussions to decide details and directions before starting to create the content and prototype.

Prototype

We created our prototype using Figma. While we assigned specific screens for each person (from the wireframe) to complete the look, we collaborated by having long zoom meetings. This allowed us to pass the information quicker and discuss design decisions as we work on a screen. Lastly, it helped us to deliver consistent looks through the App.

Recommendation

As this project was conducted in two weeks, it trained me how to user research and deliver execution within fast-paced environments. Our team was passionate about what we do, and I think that made us work well.

Some of the long zoom call sessions were over 6 hours, but I really enjoyed those meetings and working with the members as well as I felt that we had great conversations and collaborations. 

For future consideration for this project, I think it might be a good idea to present more LOCAL feelings to the App. For example, we could add a shop's bio to increase the users' engagement towards shops. On the other hand, conducting user interviews and testings will give great insights as well as ideas to modify this prototype.