Veg Patch is my third UX project I've worked on. It combines all the skills I've learned so far and uses them to tackle a cause for social good: Food Waste. Every year, 4.5 million tonnes of fresh produce is wasted in the UK, so I decided to design a responsive website and app that helps people share spare produce in their local community.

First, there were some questions to answer.

So I tried to answer them both. 

What was needed and what was already out there were two sides of the same coin. And as of writing this, there is still only one major food sharing app available to the public (OLIO) and a load of fairly poorly designed apps and sites that help people find food banks. 

I made two personas based on my research for each type of user that may visit the site or app. One for a user that wants to donate and one for a user that wants to find food.  

I then began sketching ideas and brainstorming ways to design the app part of Veg Patch, always trying to keep the two main user flows at the forefront of my effort (Donating and Finding). On the left are my paper wireframes and on the right are my digital lo-fi wireframes. 

I then conducted a usability study to test my prototype. It was mostly positive, but there were some key areas that needed addressing, most importantly CTAs, navigation and the UI. These P0s were then given priority as I iterated on my prototypes and designed my Mockups.

I then connected my art boards, added animation, colour, typography and transitions to help the app function properly. After this, I conducted another usability study and found that whilst I had addressed the P0s in the previous study, I needed to change some aspects of the colour scheme to keep it more consistent. 

Finally, I completed my Hi-Fi prototype for the Veg Patch Dedicated App. See this here.  

I then began to scale up my dedicated app to a responsive website for both desktop and tablet. 

After these preliminary designs, I added a few more CTAs and made sure it was navigable. Another usability study was conducted, and the results showed that the layout was a bit disorganised; there was no clear hierarchy. Therefore, when I designed the mockups, I made sure to keep Gestalt principles more in mind as I filled out the UI with text, colour, images and fully working navigation. See these mockups below.

I then linked up the boards and made a fully working Hi-Fi prototype for the responsive website part of the project. See below and use here!

Overall, I really enjoyed this project. Not only was it more practice in the way of my UX design skills, but it also allowed me to see how it can be vehicle for social good in the way of helping solve problems for those that need it. I would love to continue iterating on these designs and testing it so that it can be as useful as humanly possible!

Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or ideas about this.