Second Harvest

Designing Food Rescue, Second Harvest’s online platform for connecting food donors with social service organizations.

Responsibilities

• Workshop Facilitation

• Information Architecture

• User Experience

• User Research & Usability Testing

• Visual Design and Prototyping

Timeline & Team

• 13 months start to with finish

• Product Designer (me), Product Manager/Customer Success Manager, Mobile Developer, QA and Client Stakeholders

Company overview

Second Harvest is the largest
food rescue organization in Canada. Their mission is to capture and redistribute surplus food, reduce waste and avert harmful greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Unable to keep up with the demands of users on their web portal, Second Harvest wanted an experience that would alleviate the frustrations felt by food donors and nonprofits.

Although the web portal was responsive, the client wanted a mobile app to increase sign-ups to the platform and allow users to donate or claim a donation from anywhere.

Discovery

I led 2 design workshops with the Second Harvest stakeholders and my internal team, to learn the experience of the current web portal and understand their goals and frustrations.

Furthermore, as Second Harvest staff were regularly in contact with their end users, they were also able to share insight on common user pains.

With this information in mind, I performed a heuristic analysis of the web app and documented the primary user flows to assess which areas of the platform needed the most improvement.

1. Allowing non-profits to view available donations

In the old platform, non-profits could only learn about new donations through email alerts. As a result, if a donation had been claimed by an organization and other non-profits had no visibility of that from the emails. To address this, I designed a page where non-profits could view all available donations in their area. On mobile, this was only presented as a list view. However, to take advantage of the extra real estate on web, I provided an additional map view.

2. Streamlined Registration

The previous registration process was hampered by irrelevant questions that often confused users. By meeting with stakeholders and pinpointing the crucial information they needed from users at this stage, I edited the copy and reduced the steps to register for donors from 10 to 5 and for non-profits 10 to 7. This reduced the number of support calls to Second Harvest and gave their staff more freedom to tackle other work tasks.

3. Reduce Donation Theft

Previously, non-profits could see the address of a donation before they claimed it. As such, some non-profits would rescue donations other organizations had already claimed, sometimes damaging the relationship between donors and other non-profits in an area. To fix this, I reorganized the donation details to include a map view of the general area of the donation, only revealing the actual address after a non-profit has claimed.

4. System Notifications

As the previous system used email alerts to keep users updated, donors and non-profits often complained of Food Rescue notifications overwhelming their inboxes. As a solution, I designed a notification section for the web and mobile app.

Visual design

Working in Sketch & Invision, I compiled a design library for web and mobile using Material Design as a reference.

outcomes & lessons

With the app launching in March 2020 and the web portal later that year, the Food Rescue platform has helped food-insecure families across the nation endure lockdowns due to COVID-19.

Since March 2020, my design work on the Food Rescue has contributed to the following:

THank-you for reading!

Wanna learn more about this project? Let’s chat

You can reach me at: kerleajoseph@gmail.com