Mercedes Benz Design Challenge 2018

Reviving Expiry with community stimuli and savings report.

Antonio Song

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7 min readDec 2, 2018

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By Antonio Song, Carnegie Mellon University, Class of 2020.
Information Systems + Human-Computer Interaction.

Design tools used: Sketch, Principle
Project Duration: 6 days

Design Challenge Brief

Introduction

Congratulations! You’ve been hired by Expiry. Expiry is a new food delivery service that only delivers food from grocery stores and restaurants that are just meeting the end of their shelf life — think that sushi box from Whole Foods or this morning’s pastries from the local bakery.
Expiry has been operating under a “mystery box” subscription that lets users set their preferences (e.g. number of people, vegan, only produce) and allows them to place an order before noon for evening delivery.

Problem Statement

Recently, Expiry has been losing customers. After doing user research, it turned out the customers want more control over their orders. Your task is to design an experience that allows customers to easily place same-day orders from a dynamic, limited supply of food.

Initial Thoughts

Personally, never in my life have I ever used a mystery box subscription service, nor an expiry date discount-based food delivery platform. Although the mystery box idea sounded fun, I myself would appreciate more control over the products I receive. However designing for myself is not “user-centered design” at all, and therefore I went out to conduct several interviews with people who frequently purchase discounted items near their shelf-life.

Fundamental Questions

What is your primary reason for purchasing products near expiry date?
Do you consider freshness of near-expiry date products important?

In-depth Interviews

I conducted interviews with one current university student who lives alone, and one university canteen employee to get a deeper understanding of the psychology of purchasing discount products reaching the end of the expiry dates.

Interview Synthesis

Left: Categorized by the interviewees, based on the in-depth interviews. Right: Categorized thematically.

I created an affinity diagram to thematically figure out the psychology of purchasing discounted items. First, insight points were organized by background information and what they seek for when purchasing discounted near-expiry items, for each people.

Then the insight points were reshuffled into the types of insight points: Personal Finance, Key Driver, Secondary Driver, Expected Outcome, and Key Requirements.

Personal Finance: The financial situation that causes the interviewees to purchase discounted near-expiry items.
Key Driver: The primary reason that causes them to purchase discounted near-expiry items.
Secondary Driver: Reasons that derive from the key drivers, doesn’t directly explain the reason for the displayed behavior, but can be used to justify the key drivers.
Expected Outcome: The expected outcome interviewees have of using discounted item services.
Key Requirements: Some of the key features that the interviewees requested to be in the app.

The results were fascinating. While both interviewees, with very different backgrounds and financial abilities both agreed that the strain on their financials is the main reason for purchasing discounted items, their key drivers were different.

Chloe the college student’s key driver is that fresh food is a luxury she cannot afford to have. Not only she doesn’t have the money, but she also doesn’t have the time to shop for fresh ingredients all the time. Furthermore, she feels that food on-campus and around the campus are not the freshest either, so she doesn’t mind if the food is less fresh, as long as it is safely edible.

Daphney the canteen employee’s key driver is that she wants to cook her kids and husband good food, but the definition of good food is not “fresh”, but rather the “original price” of the food. For example, a $5 near-expiring tenderloin is considered “better food” than a $10 Chipotle burrito.

The insights gave me a clear direction — create an experience where the users can feel the positive financial impact of the app, and where they can have the best of both worlds — affordable luxury: by showing them clear discount rates, and popular offerings to ensure that they are able to shop for the exact items they want, whether they’re for themselves, or for their loving families.

“…a $5 near-expiring tenderloin is considered better food than a $10 Chipotle burrito.”

Personas 👩‍🎓👩‍🍳

Based on the in-depth interview, I created two personas that would represent the main target market-segment for the new Expiry app.

Opportunity Space:

I realized that since these items do not have much lifespan left, I could harness the power of community stimuli to encourage users to make purchases quicker, similar to the techniques used by the hotel-booking services. These community stimuli can also be used to identify the best deals on the application, based on their popularity.

Ideation

Based on the opportunity space identified, I quickly drafted several key design goals and use cases.

Design goals

Create an easy way to see the discount rate for the items they are seeing.
Make the users feel the effectiveness of using Expiry to save money.
Create a simple yet effective navigation experience to allow users to find what they want as quickly as possible, as the inventory is limited.
Use community-stimuli to encourage to take quick actions regarding the soon-to-be-expired items.

Use cases

Recommend deals
View deals by categories
View deals by remaining stock
View deals by the discount rate
See money-saving progress
See the number of current simultaneous views

User Flow

A user flow was carefully constructed before any wireframing in order to get a holistic view of what the experience would look like and gauge the screen design requirements. I pre-determined which screens I would design within the scope of the design exercise by deciding how important the feature was within the app.

Wireframing and Prototyping

Wireframes were created using Sketch and prototypes were created using Principle.

Mid-Fidelity wireframes

I created mid-fidelity wireframes to get the sense of contextual density and scale correctly before diving too deep into the hi-fidelity wireframes.

Contextual Inquiry

I performed a contextual inquiry with the mid-fi wireframes to receive feedback from the relevant persona and iterate upon the existing wireframe.

Some of the feedback I received was:

Show the price differences on the main page.
Would love to see the total price savings.
The timestamp format on the top is a bit hard to comprehend.

High-Fidelity Wireframes

After making several fixes on the mid-fi wireframes, I proceeded to create high-fidelity wireframes.

Some of the fixes include:

Changing the timestamp format from HH:MM:SS to HH hrs MM min.
Included both the original price and the discounted price within the card layout.
Added the feature to track monthly savings in the Profile page.
Gave color difference in the two purchase options, hierarchically making “Add To Cart” have precedence over “Quick Purchase”, to reduce slips regarding accidental quick purchases.
Added a search bar to the categories page to allow users to quickly and directly search for items they desire to purchase.