TUFO- Food Booking System

It’s a master's graduation project with the company Cirfood and Tudelft Food Design Lab.
The project ends with the holistic banquet service concept, which integrates with the website, APP, and packages to apply numerous design interventions for multiple stakeholders to meet their value towards collaborating to reduce food waste.

User research, UX Design, Web & App Design, Package Design

Period

July 2022 – December 2022

Role

UX Designer (From research to design solution)

Contribution

Project management, User research, Concept development,  Prototyping, UX/UI design, User test planning and facilitation

Challenges and opportunities of the TUdelft Banquet system

The banqueting service: TUDelft will have hundreds of daily meetings and lectures in different faculties with diverse people. Usually, it is a ritual that provides the audience with food. Normally it is provided during during, after, or before the meeting. Conference organizers must tell the security to book the food previously through the current website.

Massive food waste is produced everyday day and the don’t have the hint to know how to solve it.

Research questions

Design timeline

Exploratory Research

To gain an initial understanding of the Banquet System workflow and how each stakeholder contributes to the ordering process, I conducted exploratory research. This included user interviews and observations during ordering sessions. My aim was to thoroughly examine stakeholders' perspectives on food waste and their current banqueting experiences, as well as explore how I could support their efforts to reduce food waste. The central question became: How can we reduce food waste in TUD's banqueting system?

Synthesis

During my research, I discovered that the food booking process involves complex steps and is inefficient. Multiple factors contribute to food waste. For instance, the secretary is the sole person authorized to order food, yet they often lack crucial meeting information. This leads them to order based on guesswork and past experiences, rather than accurate data.

To address this situation, I gathered data and mapped the current pain points onto a journey map. This provides an overview of how the secretary and Cirfood operate. Below are the key findings from this data analysis.

Key findings :

Data analysis

Understanding problem scope

Different stakeholders have quite diverse pain points, and in this project, I have the find a goal to achieve. To understand current problems, I analyzed problems in the whole booking journey and identified 3 major gaps. I also brainstormed how I could bridge the gap to create the ideal solution. The main Gaps are the communication gap, Motivation gap, and environment gap.

Design opportunities

The design session is a loop process, The problem scope help me to narrow down the design direction, while I still need to find out what the specific design point I can come up with. So I cluster the pain points from different stakeholders into different topic. Such as Reduce uncertainty , create the appreciate atmosphere etc to help me think about the design opportunities . And finally I chose several design opportunities based on the problem scope as the main area I will design further which shows below.

Design vision

“I envision a seamless banqueting service aiming to help the organizers, orderers, and audience collaborate to reduce food waste.”

Design Iterations

After define the design goal, I did serval round design iterations to find the final design solution and also align with the user needs and the initial problem statement. Different perspective of the discussion help me to jump out of the limitation.

Final Design

Research Sources:

25 qualitative interviews: Interview with the key stakeholders to understand the pain points and relationships between the stakeholders

4 participant observations: Observe the secretariat ordering session to find out the workflow.

Desktop Research: Find the literature research such as the behavioral model

After several round iterations, the final design was integrated into the following ideas.

This is an upgraded website with clear guidelines for ordering food, and it facilitates communication between orderers and conference organizers. It also provides a digital form for collecting data from large meetings.

Touchpoint 1 Increase the experience of booking the food

Previous Website

Improve the navigation system :
Users could check the order information, search the food information and get the guide to order the food from the website.

After several round iterations, the final design was integrated into the following ideas.

This is an upgraded website with clear guidelines for ordering food, and it facilitates communication between orderers and conference organizers. It also provides a digital form for collecting data from large meetings.

Current Website

Redefining the priority of the information

Users could evaluate how many sandwiches they should order through the picture, and the reminding of the number of sandwiches is for how many people.

Add the personal page with multiple guideline functions
In the personal page, the user could check the order history, review the upcoming order, and communicate with other orderers.

Add the tips to build the communication between orderers
The tips help the orderer increase the efficiency of the ordering process and can take reference to review the other order tips.

See the up coming order history +communicate/Invite the conference organizers

Check the order history or repeat the order

learn the successful order from others

Download the form to collect the food data.

Using scenarios

It shows the touchpoints that connect with different stakeholders

Service Blueprint

After several round iterations, the final design was integrated into the following ideas.

This is an upgraded website with clear guidelines for ordering food, and it facilitates communication between orderers and conference organizers. It also provides a digital form for collecting data from large meetings.

Summary

Touchpoint 3 Prevent the food waste at the last session

The package aims to motivate people to take the left food and encourage more students to join in reducing food waste. It has two ways to encourage them to reuse the food. One is the route on the map that encourage students to walk after the intensive study and eat the sandwich with the company of the lovely animals in Delft. The other one is the recipe to recook the food. So people could take it away from home and reuse it. While for students who want to eat directly at the univer- sity can also use the package to pack the food in different faculties. It inspired people to feel motivated to reuse food and easily reduce it.

Touchpoint 2 Engage the stakeholders into the system

Benefits

  • Fit with users’ daily journey to check the calendar and naturally engage the food information or the participant form into this module

  • Upload the free food in time to the TUfo App and the students can also check the food news from this platform to

  • Recommend the nearest food location from the user’s place

  • Build the food community to share tips to reduce food waste