In America, 108 billion pounds of food is wasted each year. To encourage food waste recycling, as well as make the grocery shopping progress more convenient, I created the conceptual food service experience Mercado.
Goals
Delightful
Users should feel a sense of joy and delight throughout the experience. Whether it's the ability to order groceries for delivery or peace of mind that their waste is being recycled, every part of the process should elicit happiness.
Familiar
With all the different food ordering apps such as Doordash, Grubhub, Postmates, etc., using common UI elements and layouts, mixed with an added unique Mercado flare, will make the experience much easier to use.
Planting the Seeds
What is Mercado?
By defining user needs and the touch points that would fulfill those needs, I was able to begin structuring the user experience of Mercado.
Who is Mercado?
- Young adult (about 20s to 30s)
- Lives comfortably
- Works long and frequent hours
- Environmentally conscious
Exploring a walk-through of the process and identifying the user helped me identify the more specific features Mercado needed to accomplish, leading into feature development of the app and needing to look at existing examples of food service apps. To gather these best practices, I looked to delivery experiences like Doordash for UX trends and patterns.
An Experience Blooms
Joining Mercado
By targeting ads to contexts that involve shopping and food, as well as environments Mercado's users exist in most often, Mercado establishes its purpose for potential users and becomes visually associated with those parts of their daily routine.
When first joining Mercado, users go through a form process to create an account, which avoids having these steps interrupt the shopping experience later on.
Placing an Order
To reduce the number of items users have to sort through when shopping, items are listed by more generic terms. Once selected, users can specify size, type, and quantity to ensure they get exactly what they need and nothing more.
Following design patterns and standards for the checkout process, Mercado incorporates full user control over each and every step while maintaining connection to the brand.
Returning Waste
Whether the user has the ability to compost themselves or not, Mercado supports the effort to reduce food waste through the user experience.
If users are already proactive about reducing food waste, Mercado allows them to create composting profiles that provide accurate tracking data of the compost process.
Users unable to compost their own food waste are able to send food waste back to Mercado's own composting facilities by storing their waste in the delivery box they arrived in.
More than Just Groceries
Whether it's at home or at a Mercado facility, Mercado involves users in every step of the composting process, giving them a sense of gratification and satisfaction for helping solve the issue of excess food waste.
Next Steps
Companion Experiences
While the current experience handles the user purchasing items from Mercado, the main use-case, there are other use cases to consider. Developing experiences for those looking to work as a delivery driver or employee at some point in the experience would need a separate avenue to avoid cluttering the current experience, as would farmers and food producers looking to work with Mercado.