The project

Waste Angels is a new sustainable supermarket located in Orlando, Florida. Its unique value proposition is to be a nearly waste-free business, which sells its products in reusable containers and avoids at all cost the use of plastic and paper.

The role

The Waste Angels project counts with a team of UX researchers and designers, but they needed a visually-oriented specialist for the interface design and decided to subcontract it. That was my role in this project: UI Designer.

The product

My mission was to create a fully functional shopping app for the supermarket. They had a rough idea of what they wanted and some research I could base my designs on, so I used it for the whole process to come.

Persona

This is the persona that the WA team came up with: Amelia.

The persona perfectly reflects what the potential clients are looking for: a place where they can buy food without feeling guilty for all the waste they are producing.

User journey map

And this is their journey map. With these and other tools they gave me, I started the creation process.

This user journey helped me wrap my mind around the intention of the app. The improvement opportunities were specially useful.

Ideation and prototyping

The first step I took was to get some inspiration from other food-ordering apps. Some of the design ideas coming from supermarket apps and others from restaurants and food trucks.

These are two of the interfaces I used as inspiration for my designs.

Digital wireframes

For the homepage, I decided to propose an idea I’ve seen in mobile games, and which makes them interestingly engaging: a feature that showcases the user’s earned “batches.”

(For example, if they have already saved 5 kilos of waste with their purchases, they win the flower batch. At 10 kilos, they upgrade from flower to tree, and so on.)

The team mentioned the idea of including batches so recurrent buyers would do a kind of “level up” the more waste they saved, so I added it to the home screen and it was greatly accepted.

An important feature for the product page was the one for selecting the item’s size.

Lo-fi prototype

With every screen connected to each other, this was how the prototype for the main user flow looked like:

Early testing

In order to spot friction points and general problems with the app before going hi-fi, we decided to perform an early set of usability studies on four (4) potential users. Below you’ll see some of their comments collected on a JamBoard Affinity Diagram:

High fidelity

After taking users’ feedback into account and solving the discovered issues (mainly the button sizes at the cart and checkout), this is what the final screens looked like:

The handoff

This was my whole participation in this project. After finishing the hi-fi prototype, I handed it off to the UX team so they could keep working on it until the complete product is ready for launching.

What I learned

This was my first time working on a UX team, so I learned a lot in the process. It was highly engaging to have conversations with my peers regarding my design decisions, receiving their feedback as well as raising my hand when I saw something that we could improve.

Also, I really appreciate the labor that the Waste Angels guys are doing for the world, making it a more sustainable and healthy place for humans to live. It was great to work for a project you want to see succeeding.

Try the final prototype yourself!

This was the Waste Angels project

I hope you liked this summary of my participation in this project. If you’d like to connect, see the information below with the ways you can contact me.