Recover Rochester

The E-board members of Recover Rochester organization have to manage all the communications and schedule of the Volunteers, the Diner/Cafe staff and the Church/Meal Center staff. For all these communications and scheduling, they use various platforms such as Slack, Mail, WhatsApp and Phone call. This is a tedious task to manage especially as the E-board members and the volunteers are all students, they might not be available during emergencies and might not know whom to contact and how.

How to build a tangible solution to improve the communication between various organizations to reduce the food wastage?

Understanding the problem space

I work part-time at a cafe at RIT and I saw that a lot of food was thrown away everyday. I calculated the amount of food wastage per day at 21 Diners/Cafes at RIT and it was a lot. So, my team members and I decided to work towards finding a solution to reduce the food wastage. We came to know about a non-profit organization in college whose volunteers aims to do the same. Despite the existence of such organization, a lot of food was wasted everyday. We attended their weekly meetings to find out the reason and understood that there is a communication gap between the Volunteers, Cafe/Diner Staff, and the E-board members.

Interviews

We conducted 9 interviews with participant demograhphics as follows:

• 3 Recover Rochester Volunteers/E-board Members (1 field interview)
• 4 Diner/Cafe Staffs (All field interviews)
• 2 Church/Meal Center Staff (All field interviews)

We took notes and audio recordings (of the people who gave us permission to record). We also clicked pictures of the work environment after taking their permission.

Initial Plan

Food Donation Log

Inventory Process

Field Interview

Food Packed for Delivery

Transportation Provided by the College

Raw Data

Interpretation Sessions and Affinity Diagram

After each interview, we conducted an interpretation session within 48 hours of the interview. We took notes from the observations and found out the issues all the stakeholders were facing. Then we wrote down all the observations on sticky notes and made an affinity diagram. It was an iterative process and we did various modifications in our diagram in next few weeks. For that, we used Real Time Board web application.

Affinity Diagram

Major Issues Found from Research

We concluded that there are three major stakeholders here E-board Members, Diner/Cafe Staff, Volunteers. Every stakeholder has their frustrations, goals, motivations and possible triggers and considering that we made the personas. The personas were helpful as we were able to understand the pain points and used them to think about our design and what all functionalities we need to inlcude.

Persona Preparations

Structure of Low Fidelity Prototype

We gathered the data and arranged it in the form of mindmap. From that we made a Lo-Fi Prototype.

Based on different requirements, we designed different structures for three main stakeholders, volunteers, E-board members and Diner/Cafe Staff. Volunteers and E-board members have almost same structure, but the E-board members have access to more functionalities. Volunteers and cafe staff will have different group chat channels and E-board members have access to all the channels.

E-board Members and Volunteers

• My Events/Notifications(Homepage)
• Track of activity/Schedule
• Group chat Channel
• Contact list for individual communication
• Food report
• Daily report to show details about food inventory, such as amount, date, diner service and final delivery location
• Monthly and yearly report will show some visual charts of the statistics
• Profile(On the side bar)

Cafe Staff:

The functions for cafe staff more simple than those for volunteers

• My event/Notification (Homepage)
• Group chat Channel
• Contact list for individual communication
• Food report
• Profile

Wireframe

High Fidelity Prototype