OVERVIEW

Pantry Pal

Thanks to a Design Buddies scholarship, I participated in Co.Lab’s product accelerator program, which brings together cross-functional teams to build and ship a real Minimum Viable Product (MVP) within eight weeks.

PROJECT KICK-OFF

Building a mission-aligned team

Equity consciousness

After engaging in various team-building activities, my team and I aligned on a shared vision based on our values: to build a product that positively impacts underserved communities.

Inequities in higher education

After brainstorming problems to tackle and discussing their pros and cons, we landed on the opportunity gap in higher ed, specifically to tackle issues faced among low-income, first-generation (LIFG) college students.

DISCOVER

89% of LIFG college students drop out within 6 years

Through secondary research, I learned that the current financial aid system doesn’t accurately reflect the unique lived experiences of LIFG students. Financial difficulties primarily cause them to drop out earlier than their continuing education peers.

Key takeaways:

Addressing the issue of food insecurity

Our team shifted our focus to food insecurity based on the frequency of the problem (daily to weekly) and our solution’s potential impact in bridging the funds gap. After surveying 16 students on the topic, we found that:

“It was the beginning of the semester, and I was in between paychecks. I started working, but I hadn’t gotten my paycheck yet, and I didn’t know where I was going to get money for food, and I didn’t want to ask my parents. It was my old roommate from freshmen year, she told me about the food pantry and that they had free food for students. I was like ‘What? Free food?!’ I came here and I was so overwhelmed because there’s so much food you can get for free, it was like a weight was lifted off my shoulder.” — LIFG college student (Source)

DEFINE

Centering equity in design for LIFG students

It was a challenge to find LIFG students to interview, especially on a topic often associated with shame. However, my PM and I found 1 interviewee who fit our target audience to provide additional insights. We then synthesized our overall research.

Turning complexity into clarity

Together, we created an archetype to represent our learnings and align the rest of our team.

Zooming in: Translating insights into actionable goals

Creating user stories allowed us to establish specific user goals for our solution’s functionalities.

Zooming out: Bridging the gap, removing the stigma

We then crafted two problem statements to ensure our solution would be impactful:

DESIGN

Brainstorming features

We began our solution ideation by brainstorming and prioritizing features and discussing technical constraints with developers.

Assessing trade-offs

I created early sketches of our core features as well as additional features (i.e. user profile photos on pantry card listings & leaving reviews) for team feedback. My intent was to foster a sense of community to address the stigma. However, after thoughtful discussion, we decided to focus on one core feature for our MVP and save the rest for future developments.

Bringing Pantry Pal to life

We settled on a Yelp-inspired web-responsive app that allows users to enter their location to find free food pantries in their local area.

Pantry Pal’s MVP allows its users to enter their location and find free food organizations in their local area with over 15,000 mapped out nationwide.

They also get up-to-date information on each organization to better plan their trip.

DEVELOP

Hand-off to developers and test

Our app was initially designed for mobile but evolved into a web-responsive app during development. After conducting usability tests with 5 target users, we found some critical errors to fix in future iterations, in addition to success outcomes.

Retrospective