Mobile App Development
LocalsOwn
LocalsOwn is a startup out of the HotHouse Accelerator program in downtown San Luis Obispo. They offer direct delivery for farmers market products. While I was interning with LocalsOwn a grant opportunity presented itself to create an app that addressed food waste and food insecurities on campus. The founder of the company, Joey Lyman, and I then researched, prototyped, and pitched an app that redistributed potential food waste to food insecure students.
Personas
There were two main personas that we identified as our target users. They included a student that needed groceries to stay within her budget, a student who needed a more convenient way to access food bank items.
Priority Matrix
After understanding the needed features to lessen user pain points I conducted a priority matrix to prioritize which features we should focus on first.
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Low Fidelity Wireframes
The first wireframes were completed on balsamiq, a prototyping platform. We sketched out user interfaces for both students and producers. On the student’s interface we sketched out alerts to inform users of available food, directions to producers, and quantities of each item available.
The "producers" in this case were the campus markets and on-campus farms that would be throwing away food within the next 24 hours. On the producer side we featured a simplistic way to upload their items within 5 clicks. It was important to keep the "necessary clicks" low to increase the likelihood that producers would use our product. By streamlining the uploading process we lessen the burden on producers and in turn increased their likelihood to post on the platform.
After sketching up wireframes, I made a low fidelity prototype in Balsamic.
After doing a few user tests with the low fidelity prototype to insure the user flow was natural and intuitive,
I made the high fidelity prototype in Adobe XD.
Design System
LocalsOwn used colors that were reminiscent of nature, like green brown and orange. They are recognizable by their custom carrot logo and Niveau Grotesk font. Since Cal Poly and LocalsOwn shared the color green in their branding we decided to use green tones in our app as much as possible.
Impact
We presented this app to my university board for a grant proposal to help connect food -insecure students to places of food-waste on campus. Although our app was not chosen to fund the board, it was exposed and impressed by the idea of solving the issue of food insecurity on campus with technology.
Other Projects
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