A mobile food delivery app designed for Student’s Families who face food insecurity, supported by Los Angeles Unified School District(LAUSD).
“How Might We provide a better experience to the students via the existing universal student free meal program and help their families that experience food insecurity?”
Project Brief
In the interactive design studio class, We were challenged to develop an interactive experience that solves food insecurity issues during the covid-19 pandemic.
Insight
50% of food-insecure families in Los Angeles have children in their households.
Solution
DinDin is a mobile app built based on LAUSD's universal free school meal program, helping students' families avoid facing food insecurity in LA.
Point of View
LA Schools provide food to students through the Universal Free Student Meals program. This is an opportunity to help families who face food insecurity.
Interviews
We were able to find real stories. Irma, Eileen, and Raqucal’s experiences helped us better understand what it’s like facing food insecurity and provided us with more insight into our point of view.
“Without the Summer Lunch Program and other Food Bank programs, I know more families in my community would struggle.”
— Irma Andrade
“[The Food Stamp] was not enough to cover the entire meal for our family, but it helped us a lot.”
— Eilleen
“Being homeless costs 3 times more than regular living.”
— Racquel
Storyboard
We were able to define our target (Student’s family), our problems (Students are having hard time to eat and student’s family have hard time to get food), our ideas (Take to-go food home from school), and potential difficulties (How student feel).
WireFrame
We wanted to mainly focus on the critical part of the app first, which was the order and schedule page.
Competitive Analysis
We found out that “Number of food users can avoid, “Opt-out the ingredients,” and “Menu accessibility“ are the few points we could make our app stand out more compared to other ones. We gave users easy access to avoid the food they didn’t like. We added different ingredients for users to alternate. We created a better UI design, such as a sticky order button and category navigation for users to navigate easily.
Low-fidelity Prototype
User Testing
From the user testing, we were able to get feedback such as “Need more simple dishes, “Too much scrolling to get to the order button,” and ”Personal information safety consideration”….
Branding
We came up with the some names and logos, the color themes, and fonts to ensure that everything is consistent as a brand. We decided to chose din-din as our product name. Din-din feels like home and it also has the alert feeling that reminds us how important it is to be able to eat.
Final Product
We want to make sure our product is used by people who really need help. We wish to verify family incomes to make sure they are qualified. To get people to trust our product, we decided that the school will be directly involved with families’ information, and the school will give the access code once the family is qualified. We changed the dishes to simple dishes. We added more options for users. We are delighted with our final product, and we hope governments to apply this idea to these families.
Final Reflection
We all have many different ideas and opinions about our project. We were organized. Because we have so many ideas, sometimes it’s hard to focus. I wish we could be more focused. I like how we cooperate and take advantage of our skills. Everyone is good at different things, and we teamed up on that. I wish we have more time to go over stuff. I wish we had done more research and talked to more people about food insecurity. We would probably get more insights that could help our project.
This project can come true and help more people. I have learned a lot from the project. The dates we collected about people facing food insecurity were shocking. It inspires me to be a better designer and help people have a better life. I had a fantastic time working on the project; it was a meaningful experience.