WePrep Case Study

Food as the next frontier of trust: A speculative design case study encouraging meal sharing among strangers.

Team: Olga Khvan, Shian Yang, Zoë Rathbun.

Duration: 1 week

The Masters of Human-Computer Interaction and Design (MHCI+D) program at the University of Washington kicked off with a week-long design sprint. Our constraints centered around combining CSCW (computer supported cooperative work) and civic engagement.

Having lived in housing cooperatives, I am no stranger to cooperation around food and household labor. I see food as an essential means of increasing civic engagement by bringing otherwise dissimilar people together because after all, everyone has got to eat! Being a group of people from the US, China, and Kazakstan, we were interested in using food as a scaffolding to create cross-cultural and other cross-identity ties. Our group, therefore, looked to use technology as a scaffolding to build communities around food.

Primary research: We created a primary research survey to examine barriers to sharing food. Our survey also took a broad perspective on the current cooking behaviors of people, especially people who were cooking for one.

Secondary Research: We conducted a CSCW literature review focusing on papers that discussed food and food sharing. We also did an informal review of modern food behaviors using blogs and forums as a means of gauging current trends.

All these formed a better understanding of the target audience, their needs, and barriers to use the application.

In response to our design challenge, our group ideated 30 concepts. We then downselected to our top three ideas, which addressed our design challenge most thoroughly.

Concept 1. Food skillshare.

Users form a specific dietary, nutritional, or cuisine group.
An expert in that group organizes a tutorial at their house where group members cook together. The group members cook together while also exchanging and building knowledge.

Concept 2. Customize your diet.
Users join or create the group. Inside this group, they can organize a meal in which they split cooking responsibilities. They each take on a roll: planner, shopper, cooker, etc. After cooking, they share the meal.

Concept 3. Meal prepping + swap
Users create or join a group around their diet/cuisine preferences (no more than 7 in a group). Each of the members indicates what they are going to cook. They meet at a particular time and swap the cooked meals on a regular basis.

While all of our ideas had merit, we selected the meal prep + swap idea as being the most straight-forward and feasible solution. We saw a space for our service to help meal-preppers build a varied diet around their nutritional preferences while being sensitive to modern schedules.

The idea of trust continually came up in our critique session. People were understandably squeamish about eating food prepared in another person’s kitchen. We, therefore, decided to build paper prototypes of two case-studies exploring the idea of increasing trust within our application.

We created a flowchart to visualize the essential steps in the use-cases that we wished to test. This process allowed us to decide the number and function of screens within our prototypes. Next, we crafted paper prototypes and tested them in the field with a handful of participants.

Our first prototype centered on the use case of the meal preparation and swapping process. We thought that having users take photos of the meal preparation process would increase trust in the food of other users. We quickly found that this process confusing and cumbersome for our participants. Users were confused about why they had to take photos at every step of the process. They reported that being presented with this task on a weekly basis would deeply frustrate them. Our test showed us that the amount of trust built with this functionality was marginal compared to the effects that it had on usability.

Creating identity verification and rating functionalities were more useful in building trust among our users. By verifying the identity of users, bad actors would be discouraged. By adding rating systems, users are encouraged and rewarded for putting effort into their meals. Because of their extensive usage among other applications, users found these features intuitive and reported that this feature eased some of their concerns about eating the food of someone that they don’t know. Participants did report that they would be more likely to use this service in the contexts of their own social networks. They would also be more likely to use the application if they knew someone else who had used it.

Based on our feedback, we streamlined the meal preparation and swap use-cases of our application. We focused on identity verification through third parties like facebook or google, social engagement, and the planning of swaps as the main functionalities of our application.

Secondly, we found that users were intimidated by having to swap each week. We decided it would be better to create larger food preference groups in which users could choose to join posted swaps. With this structure, users would have the opportunity to share meal-preps in different small groups and tailor their swaps to fit their busy schedules.

Finally, we decided to put the power to create groups in the hands of the users and created a moderation system. Because there are so many dietary preferences that could be overlapping, we didn’t want to limit users in the specificity of the groups that they created. In our final solution, moderators would create groups that could range in specificity from “vegans with peanut allergies” or “I will eat anything meal-preppers.” Moderators have the power to approve new users based on their profiles and ratings. The moderator is also in charge of reviewing the content of the group in the form of acceptable recipes that are uploaded by members — contributing to the knowledge sharing features of the application.

Building trust within an application is a complicated and fascinating process. Apps like Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb have fundamentally changed the behaviors that individuals are willing to undertake. Most of us remember being raised learning about “stranger danger,” but now don’t blink an eye when getting into a strangers’ car or staying in a strangers’ home. In a way, the facilitation of trust between people is the main product or service that applications like Uber and Airbnb provide. I see food as the next frontier in this trust economy. Eating another person’s food is even more intimate than staying in their home for the simple fact that food goes inside our bodies. Allergies, food sensitivities, and government regulations bring even more complications into this sphere. Due to these complications, I see this particular design project as mostly speculative. I am, however, interested in how projects around food, technology, and trust will develop in the future.

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