Validating Our Concept

Background

For the last two quarters, a small team of myself and two other designers wanted to better understand the barriers people with food insecurity are facing to access affordable food and the impact of this on their lives. We conducted contextual interviews and a relational mapping activity with subject matter experts in local government, organizers of different food assistance programs, and people within our community experiencing food insecurity to better understand:

• Ways in which food surplus/waste can be redistributed to people experiencing food insecurity

• Our objective is to explore access to a variety of food options for individuals who experience food insecurity.

• To understand the accessibility and preference for fresh foods, prepared foods, and canned foods, etc.

We learned that while there are a lot of great organizations providing access to food in Austin they can be confusing and difficult for people in extremely difficult situations to access. We quickly identified the ATX Free Fridge, a Mutual Aid organization, as an low barrier program for people to access food. In our research, we learned these fridges were inconsistently full, which creates a new barrier for those experiencing food insecurity. We heard from fellow community members and organizers that while there is no shortage of people interested in helping in our community, people often can give from a misguided place, donating and volunteering can be inconvenient, and people can be too burnt out from their own day to day lives to turn thought into action.

With our learnings in mind, we began ideating possible solutions with the following question: how might we make it more convenient, social, and scalable for people to contribute to community fridges, to improve consistency of food access?

Our answer was One Village: a web app to help community members donate more efficiently, while fostering connections within the local community.

We had plenty of hypotheses about why this would meet the pain points we initially heard about from our research participants, but we had yet to confirm these with real people.

Experiment 1: Our killer assumption

We needed to test our most lethal, killer assumption first: did people really want to use One Village? To test this we asked our Free Fridge partner to post a survey we wrote to their Instagram page gauging the Free Fridge followers interest in receiving a suggested weekly grocery list of items needed at the Free Fridge, frequency of reminders they’d like, and whether or not they’d want assistance in getting food to the fridge. We

Our metric for success was receiving 25-50 responses, however, 148 participants within 24 hours, with others requesting to be added to the list after.

In addition to validating the desire for One Village, we also learned some important things about our user base:

• People are interested in recurring notifications

• People prefer to drop off their donations

• People are not interested in sharing their location

Experiment 2: Differences in donations

This experiment was important in validating our hypothesis that people will purchase items off a provided grocery list and donate them to the Free Fridge. We broke up the contact information provided by our survey participants and divided them into groups, to receive either a specific list or generic list of things to donate. We asked they reach back either by email or text with a picture of what they donated, and their fridge location.

We soon realized that asking for participants to send us a picture was actually requesting two behavior changes: people were used to interacting with the Instagram page and had been sending pictures and confirmation to the page. We got in touch with the Free Fridge organizers and requested they forward any donation confirmations overlapping with the lists.

Through this experiment we learned a little more about our users:

• There is a preference for specific lists over generic lists

• Texts lead to more engagement over emails

Experiment 3: Social Engagement

This experiment was focused on proving whether we could leverage storytelling and social connection through recipe sharing to increase home-cooked meal donations at the fridge and increase feelings of connectivity.

We included a message to our existing user base providing an easy pasta salad recipe and them to cook a little extra to donate to the Free Fridge. Our success metric used was 3+ users making the recipe and sending us confirmation. This experiment has yielded no responses or evidence of people participating, and has effectively invalidated this method of leveraging connection. We either need to focus more on storytelling and

Reflection

This period of rapid experimentation has been incredibly rewarding. The combination of general success and validation of our work these last six months in tandem with the gratification and joy of seeing people giving has been incredible. I feel confident that our concept is on the right path, given the outcome of our first two experiments, but I do feel some uncertainty about the third. I think our method of leveraging social participation didn’t relate enough to our findings and what we know works: shared social identity and storytelling. I’d like to go back and play with both how we measure how our participants feel about different methods of social leveraging vs whether the amount of donations increases given social participation. With hindsight, I feel this experiment didn’t give us a clear understanding of anything, except that people didn’t want to make pasta salad this week.