Open Fridge
A mutual-aid app prototype to support locating, donating, and picking-up from local community fridges.
Role: UX Co-designer, Co-researcher
Team: Myself and two other UT students
Timeline: Spring 2022 (2 weeks)
Tools: Figma
The problem
Community fridges are a common form 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 the process of donating and retrieving food laborious.
Our solution
RESEARCH&DESIGN
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 contributions to this project 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.
Ideation
Figjam brainstorming
Prototyping
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
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
Low fidelity sketches
Our final mid-fidelity prototype consisted of seven screens to display the range of experiences that users can achieve with the app.
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.