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Open Fridge



Open Fridge is an app prototype created for my Intro to Social Justice Informatics course, consisting of eight mid-fidelity screens. My team and I were instructed to create a design that addressed a subject from our course materials throughout the semester. Our first design brainstorming session led us to the topic of food scarcity and the mutual-aid organizations that work to combat this issue. Community fridges became the center of our discussion, so we decided to create an app that could consolidate information from local organizations that host community fridges and faciliate the donating and pick-up process for users. This mid-fi prototype consists of seven screens that address seven primary functions of our app, which incorporate social media, map, and purchasing features. 
role
UX Co-Designer,
UX Co-Researcher

team
 Myself and two other UT students

timeline
Spring 2022 (2 weeks)

tools
 Figma



the problem                 

Community fridges are often one of the many facets of mutual-aid, and work to strengthen the community by reducing food insecurity and food waste with little financial risk. These fridges do require some management, which is why they’re usually sponsored by different local mutual-aid organizations, but their ability to function primarily depends on the support they recieve from the community through donations and usage. Because of the decentralized nature of these fridges, it’s often difficult to obtain information about all of the different community fridges in one area—making it the process of donating and retrieving food inaccessible.


our solution                
Open Fridge retains the crowd-based nature of community fridges while simultaneously centralizing information to create a seamless experience for the user. The app features a social media and chat component to connect organizations with their target audience, a map to easily locate all nearby community fridges, a mobile payment page so users can directly donate money to an organization of their choice, and a “profile” page for each community fridge that lists its stock and allows users to either donate certain food or place a request for pick-up.


The Design Process 


Since our project only involved creating a low fidelity design to support our concept, the design process just consisted of two stages after the brainstorming phase. I took the ideas and inspiration we came up to create low fidelity sketches, which we then transformed into multiple mid-fidelity wireframes using Figma. Below I’ve included the sketches we used, as well as our final product and a demo of the prototype in action.


my role
For this project, each team member shared the responsibility of designing at least two screens for prototype. We all contributed to the brainstorming process, which allowed us to fully form our ideas for the app, but my specific contributions were generating the initial concept of a community fridge locator—which I came up with after going through the confusing process of trying to find and donate to a local community fridge—and designing the low fidelty sketches. My role as a UX/UI designer involved designing the fridge profile screens for both user and organizer, the cart screen, and I created the demo for our final project using Figma’s prototyping feature.


01. brainstorming

Each group member did preliminary research on local mutual aid organizations that sponsored community fridges, so we input all of our references and ideas we came up with onto one figjam to aid with future development.  






02. low fidelity sketches

To ensure ultimate usability, we also created two different user experiences—visitor and organizer—that share many of the same interfaces but differ in that only organizers can update fridge profiles and post on the social media feed. While the protoypes we created did not cover all of the app’s components, we did focus on demonstrating the differences for users and organizers through one of the app’s main features, the fridge profile.




03. final wireframes






05.  prototype demo







future directions
Due to the quick timeline and level of detail required for this project, we weren’t able to create a full prototype for Open Fridge. In the future, I’d like to continue developing this app by designing high fidelity wireframes for every screen, creating a strong brand identity through a color scheme and signature graphics, and doing more user research on how to make this app valuable to its target audience.