Hiww (pronounced 'hue') is a mobile app designed to address Thailand's growing food waste problem. We connect unsold, end-of-day meals from local restaurants to nearby consumers at discounted prices.
Product Designer, Strategy
Summer 2023
Me
Joy Leeswadtrakul
Earth Kulruchakorn
May Tantipipatpong
Figma
đ Bangkok, Thailand
This was a side project inspired by our interest in tackling food waste in Bangkok. My teammates and I shared a vision to help local restaurants reduce waste at the end of the day by providing a platform for customers to purchase surplus food. As the project manager and the sole designer, I led the team through ideation, research, and the development of our solution.
Market Research & Surveys: Conducted research to understand food waste and user behavior.
âCompetitor Analysis: Identified gaps and opportunities in the food marketplace industry.
âUser Interviews: Spoke with restaurant owners and potential users to gather insights.
âUser Journey & Personas: Mapped out user flows and key personas to shape design decisions.
âIdeation & Wireframing: Developed wireframes to visualize and iterate on the platformâs key features.
âBranding & UI/UX Design: Designed the app's interface, focusing on usability and clear branding.
Due to demand unpredictability and short shelf-life products, we end up throwing away around 6-7kgs of food waste every day.
- Hotel Cafe
Due to my busy schedule, I tend to find quick eats around the office. However, it costs so much to eat out and I often end up spending too much money.
- Office-worker in her 20s
To identify customer target segment/potential users
To understand user motivations, pain points and customer journey
To understand restaurant's food waste problems
Survey & Interview Summary
ââ(See research objectives, initial stakeholder discussions, UX goals, key takeaways)
Competitor Analysis
I decided to analyze the alternatives respondents have mentioned to discover promotional food items. This is to help us find a unique positioning that will make our product stand out from others. Key insight: No other food platforms focus on promotions/discounts
After conducting user interviews, stakeholder interviews, secondary research, and competitive research, these are other key insights that made us better understand the problem, frustrations, and needs of customers and restaurants.
Through a series of user interviews, we gained a deeper understanding of the pain points and motivations of our target audience. This allowed us to redefine who we are designing for:
.png)
.png)
Based on interviews with potential users and surveys, I categorized my observations using a customer journey map. This helped me expose pain points and areas I can address, along the entire user journey.
⢠Based on customer's existing journey, I created the user journey for our app. The main stages are: Discover, Make Decision, Plan. I combined Discover, Explore, Investigate into one main stage to help simplify the journey.Â
⢠I created more specific 'How Might We' questions for each stage in order to help guide the design of our product and listed out potential features that would solve them.
Below are wireframe versions of the homepage. After showing restaurants and users different initial designs, they preferred option 2 as the homepage. Because they highly value convenience, we went with the map-style to clearly show restaurants nearby.
Choosing colors & typography that align with our concept - I chose yellow/orange color as the secondary color because according to color psychology, yellow and orange are colors that make people feel hungry.
Final logo design made with Adobe Illustrator. Here I combined 2 aspects of the product, a pin (represents map app) and a spoon (represents food app) and combined the primary and secondary colors. Â
Geo-triggered push notifications will inform users of nearby restaurants going online and offering special promotions (to help stimulate user engagement)
.gif)
⢠Sort by distance, price or popularity
⢠Filter search results and âexplore nearbyâ suggestions by price, distance, dietary options, only displaying places currently online or selecting windows of when restaurants usually go onlineÂ
Real-time GPS Navigation to view the best route and the estimated travel time. Users won't have to switch to multiple platforms and sources.
⢠After users purchase a meal, they collect points that takes them closer to the next milestone. This provides instant gratification.
⢠Profile page contains statistics that can act as another motivating factor for increased engagement.
⢠We would like to continue this project because after talking to several restaurants, they have validated our idea and believed this product could be beneficial to them.
⢠In the future, we will need to conduct user testing in order to refine our idea and validate whether our product really solves customersâ pain points.
⢠I will also need to design the restaurantâs version of the product, including how they would input leftover items into the system.
⢠With more time, I would explore more solutions / features to meet our HMW statements and evaluate the options with my team to find the best solutions
⢠Learned how to scope down ideas into a solution that targets our persona and considers the competitive landscape
⢠Importance of user interviews and validating our hypothesis - some restaurants already had their own way of dealing with leftovers and didnât have the need to use this product. Interviewing several restaurants made us realize we should focus our efforts on a smaller market segment, targeting restaurants with packaged food.
⢠Learned about leading and managing a team, including setting meetings, splitting and organizing tasks and setting deadlines. Since this was a side project we did during school semester, I learnt about the challenges of motivating team members and about the importance of setting goals and expectations.