• Joey Dietrich

• Julia Guida

• Sarah Cuison

• Valerie Nault

the problem

When looking at this project’s prompt, ‘Reducing Inequalities’, as a team we chose the inequality many of our peers can find themselves struggling with. When researching the issues affecting specifically the student communities, food insecurity is one of the most common inequalities on post-secondary campuses. This leads us to our main question: how might we reduce food insecurity among postsecondary students and make food more accessible for lower-income students?

the solution

I believe that every postsecondary student deserves the means to affordable comfort food that can be made at their convenience, without any worries of cost or time. 

We’ve developed HeavenSent, an online meal scheduling-and-ordering service; students can purchase home-cooked and ready-to-heat portioned meals ahead of time, so they can easily plan and prepare their meals each week without having to miss a meal. HeavenSent focuses on solving postsecondary food insecurity, by providing students with benefits such as discounted food items and free delivery within a campus radius or a flat rate of $3 outside of the 3km radius when they sign up through their school portal.

In the app, students will be prompted to select a future date to receive their meals, and then they can browse a variety of cuisines and dishes made by local home cooks. They can read about the home-cooks business, each specific dish, and then add a set amount of meals to their cart. Once the order is ready, they can get their ready-to-heat portioned meals delivered to their front door, on a scheduled date and time. Overall, HeavenSent aims to provide a more convenient, comfortable and smarter way for students to obtain the essential food they need.

THE PROCESS

The idea started as a local food bank, grocery store and small business instantaneous food delivery service. While it could help food insecurity, it was way too broad, and the logistics for handling the number of partnerships for one app was a lot to control. That is why we narrowed our idea to small businesses, specifically home-cooks that will sell their meals from their own homes. The idea that an app can provide post-secondary students with a way to schedule and order ahead ready-to-heat portioned meals made by local home cooks. Who currently sell their dishes through platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook. Their dishes are priced relatively low, which can help support our users who may be food insecure.

Logo and Design system

Since our application is for university students I wanted to showcase a modern academic aesthetic. The sans serif Raleway font gave us a fresh style with lining numerals that closely reflect this. Our secondary font Inter was used to further improve overall readability and app saliency.

The logo was created with three elements that encompass our brand. The angle wing shape correlates to the first half of our brand name, the “S” shape of the wing represents “Sent” as the second half of our brand name, and the rounded diagonal layout represents steam from warm meals delivered to students.

Design system

Universities are known for innovation and discovery which is why the main colour of our application was purple as it psychologically portrays similar values of wisdom and nobility. We chose to pair this with orange since it complements our main colour and conveys messages of freshness and warmth given that our application contains features that display cooked meals and grocery items. The last colour used is white to represent cleanliness and efficiency to further emphasize the ease of use our app may offer. Our design system was built using various elements from other credible design systems such as the Coder House design system, Google’s Material Design, and Uber’s Base design.

Heading and body text typography was also created to fit multiple screen sizes including desktop, tablet and mobile screens. Our main colours were added into a centralized library that syncs to all our project files. We built our bottom navigation tabs with filled icons that were highlighted using our main colour as indicators for the pages we built.

Our call to action is usually purple which further reinforces our branding and Black to provide seriousness for certain actions. Success, errors and links were given bright colours such as green, red and yellow as these are important actions users might need to focus on. The buttons and input fields have a roundness of about 12px and are in grayscale to improve the saliency and readability of the overall page. Grocery items cards and food cards were created as reusable components alongside various pill-shaped buttons for filters and our shopping cart.

initial research

Competitor Analysis

1. Community Fridge KW

Community fridges are public repositories of fresh, donated foods that anyone can take from for free, designed to facilitate access to food and reduce food waste.

• This service can be offered to any individual, however, it is only offered in person, and with limited quantities and food options.

2. Waterloo Regional Food Bank

The program is meant to provide meals to people who want affordable and accessible home meal deliveries. This service addresses (1) ensuring that people are maintaining healthy eating habits, (2) receiving hot homestyle meals or frozen meals delivered in bulk, (3) affordable food.

• However, there is no digital solution provided for this service. A person will have to visit the food bank in-person to verify their identity and status.

3. WUSA Food Support Service

A non-profit service that provides confidential assistance and food hampers to the students of the UWaterloo community experiencing food insecurity. Offering pre-packaged hampers (choice of either meat, vegetarian, halal, kosher, hygiene, or menstrual hampers) which will be available at certain locations on campus. Custom hampers are also available to those with food allergies and/or special dietary needs.

• While this service focuses on students, it is only offered in-person, and may not be enough to sustain a full meal plan for students.

4. Campus OrderUp

A mobile app specifically made for University campuses, where students can order ahead from food locations on campus using their meal plan or credit card.

• This service, may help with giving students instantaneous food deliveries at a discounted rate, however, the only food options available on this app are from fast-food chains around campus.

user flow

In order to understand our application we created a user flow to help streamline the key features of our product. Our flow starts with an our Outer Box Experience (OOBE) for users and leads into our main Runtime user flow.

WHO ARE WE Designing FOR?

OUR 3 USER TYPES

Low-Income/Food Insecure Student Users

The first user type that HeavenSent was built for revolves around students that come from low-income families and/or deal with food insecurity. As noted in our research, food insecurity is positioned as one of Canada’s major health issues that affect approximately 40% of post-secondary students. With high tuition costs and living expenses, food insecurity can undermine the health, wellbeing, and educational success of students. Our solution targets these users by providing them with affordable and healthy home-cooked meals that can be ordered in bulk. Furthermore, by partnering with universities now, students can log in to our app using their student credentials and gain access to additional discounts based on their income and their parent’s income. The individuals who are eligible will receive a flat discount of 20% on all meals and can receive free delivery if they are within 3km of the campus. This essentially removes any profit made from these meals and deliveries, and simply breaks even from the cost of the food and cost of delivery, which results in cheaper meals from students, and no direct loss of money to the participant restaurants on campus and independent contractors.

Student Users

The next user type that HeavenSent targets are the student users. Since these users do not qualify for financial aid or bursaries, they typically have to be careful when budgeting because they aren’t receiving financial support from the school or government. These students are often looking for ways to eat healthier while they’re away from home or to maximize their productivity and not have to worry about cooking. What our app provides to this user group is the ability to save time and money by providing them with free delivery if they are within 3km of the campus and also affordable ready-to-eat meal options. Free delivery is something that our competitors currently don’t provide unless the user pays for some type of delivery membership (e.g. Uber Pass). Again, to verify that the user is a student, our app will prompt the user to use their student credentials when creating an account.

Regular Users

HeavenSent caters to these individuals by providing them with ready-to-heat portioned meals, helping them budget their food costs as they become financially independent for the first time. Many of these people, having just moved out of their family's home, are looking for comfort food options such as home-cooked meals. These options are typically unavailable on other food delivery apps, which enlist restaurants and fast food chains on their app instead. This user group will sign up through our app using their personal email and may receive discounts from time to time on the basis of the individual food caterer/home cook. These users will have to pay a delivery fee, and the price of their meals will be marked up.