a research-driven product concept reframing household food waste as a behavioral and systems-design problem—balancing sustainability goals with everyday constraints like time, memory, and budget.
impact: led UX research, product definition, and interaction design for a sustainability-focused mobile concept. Translated behavioral research into product decisions that prioritized practical value over guilt-driven sustainability—shaping a system designed to reduce waste by changing everyday habits, not user intent.
my role
UX/UI Designer, UX Researcher, UX Writer
timeline
september - december 2024
tools
Figma, FigJam, Canva, Google Suite
↦ "Waste, at the end of the day, is a design flaw. It doesn’t exist in nature."
- Gabriela Hearst
↦ introduction
Household food waste is one of the largest (and least visible) contributors to environmental damage and financial loss. Despite growing awareness, most waste still happens at home, driven less by apathy and more by breakdowns in memory, coordination, and planning.
Each year, 2.5 billion tons of food are wasted globally, with nearly 40% of food in the U.S. going uneaten. Yet most existing tools address only fragments of the problem — recipes without inventory awareness, budgeting without expiration context, or education without daily reinforcement.
SustainaBite explores what it looks like to design a single, cohesive system that supports the entire lifecycle of food at home, helping households notice waste earlier, act more intentionally, and build sustainable habits without increasing cognitive load.
↦ from research to
product decision
identifying the highest-impact levers
SustainaBite was developed through a research-led process focused on identifying the highest-impact levers for reducing household food waste. And not by adding more features, but by understanding where everyday systems break down.
Through surveys and interviews, we identified forgetfulness and over-purchasing as the primary drivers of waste. Personas and journey maps helped surface where breakdowns occurred in daily routines—not just what users said they wanted.
Based on these insights, we made a deliberate decision to prioritize practical, repeatable behaviors over social features or heavy gamification, positioning SustainaBite to sit between sustainability education and everyday utility.
defining the user: designing for shared friction, different motivations
To ground design decisions in real household dynamics, we created two primary personas representing our core audiences:
jessica knight (38, stay-at-home parent, Denver)
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mitchell clark (20, college student, Chicago)
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While their contexts differed, their journey maps revealed shared friction points—forgotten food, lack of visibility, and wasted money—paired with distinct motivators.
Designing for both meant creating a platform flexible enough to support family-scale coordination and individual efficiency without fragmenting the experience.
research approach: balancing breadth, depth, and feasibility
To understand how people manage groceries and waste in real life, we used a mixed-methods approach combining surveys, competitive analysis, and interviews with primary household shoppers.
Our research focused on:
Understanding everyday behaviors and barriers around food purchasing and storage
Evaluating perceived value of proposed features like inventory tracking, AI-driven recipes, and composting guidance
Identifying gaps in the sustainability app landscape where behavior change tools fall short
key insights that changed the product direction
Research revealed that most households rely on memory or visual checks rather than structured tools, leading directly to forgotten perishables and duplicate purchases.
Forgetfulness (71%) and over-purchasing (17%) emerged as the dominant drivers of waste, particularly for short-lived items like produce and dairy. While participants expressed interest in sustainability, they consistently prioritized tools that saved time and money over abstract environmental metrics.
These insights led us to deprioritize social sharing and badge-based gamification, instead focusing on features that made waste visible, actionable, and personally valuable—reinforcing sustainability through everyday benefit rather than moral pressure.
↦ designing through constraint
iteration, tradeoffs, and what we chose not to build
SustainaBite’s design process focused on reducing complexity and reinforcing the behaviors that mattered most.
We began by testing the product’s “golden path” — adding items, tracking expiration dates, and surfacing recipes — through paper sketches and low-fidelity wireframes. Early usability testing confirmed that these flows were clear and intuitive, validating the core structure of the experience.
However, testing also revealed an important tension: while users appreciated clarity, they needed stronger incentives to return to the app over time. This prompted a critical design decision - not to add more social or gamified features, but to rethink where motivation should come from.
Based on research and testing, we deliberately chose not to build:
Social sharing or competitive leaderboards
Badge-heavy gamification disconnected from real value
Feature-rich dashboards that increased cognitive load
Instead, we focused iteration on streamlining essential flows, emphasizing inventory visibility, expiration reminders, and savings insights—features that reinforced sustainable behavior through practical, repeatable benefit rather than novelty.
This approach reduced development complexity, improved usability, and aligned the product more closely with real-world constraints, where sustainability must compete with time pressure, limited attention, and household budgets.
iteration & usability validation
early prototypes
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usability testing
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iteration outcomes
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turning insight into structure
mapping the flow
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final product direction: making sustainable choices the default
The final high-fidelity prototype translates research insights into a clean, approachable interface focused on clarity, ease of use, and immediate value—making sustainable behavior easier to maintain over time.
bringing it all together
After multiple rounds of iteration, SustainaBite’s high-fidelity prototype brought the product direction into focus: a practical, low-friction system that helps households reduce food waste through everyday decisions.
Rather than centering sustainability as a moral goal, the final design emphasizes visibility, timeliness, and personal benefit — key drivers identified through research as necessary for long-term behavior change.
key design outcomes:
Inventory Visibility & Expiration Awareness
Inventory tracking via receipts, barcodes, or manual entry ensures food is visible before it becomes waste. Smart reminders reduce reliance on memory, addressing the most common cause of household food loss.Ingredient-Driven Meal Decisions
Personalized recipe suggestions are generated from ingredients users already own—shifting meal planning from aspirational to actionable and reducing unnecessary purchases.Savings as the Primary Motivation Loop
A savings tracker surfaces the financial impact of reduced waste, reinforcing sustainable behavior through immediate, tangible reward rather than abstract environmental metrics.Lightweight Sustainability Education
Contextual tips—such as composting guidance or storage best practices—are embedded where relevant, supporting learning without interrupting core tasks.
design refinements
Faster access to inventory and expiration information
Clear visual hierarchy to reduce decision fatigue
Savings insights as the primary motivator for continued use
from prototype to polish
before (low-fidelity prototypes)
Early paper sketches and grayscale wireframes focused on validating the golden path: adding inventory, tracking expiration dates, and surfacing recipes.
Layouts were intentionally minimal to test flow and structure. Usability feedback confirmed clarity and ease of navigation but indicated a need for stronger visual distinction and feedback.
after (high-fidelity prototypes)
The high-fidelity prototype translated validated flows into a polished, accessible interface.
Introduced color, iconography, and typography hierarchy to improve clarity
Streamlined navigation for quicker access to inventory and recipes
Refined buttons, spacing, and visual feedback to support confidence and ease
Usability feedback described the experience as “organized, easy to navigate, and genuinely useful,” with users highlighting the savings tracker as especially motivating.
View the full interactive Figma prototype →
↦ moving forward
While SustainaBite addressed the core behavioral drivers of household food waste, scaling its impact would require aligning sustainable behavior with real-world incentives, infrastructure, and trust.
Future opportunities include integrating financial and operational systems that reduce friction rather than add complexity—such as partnering with grocery retailers to surface digital coupons or rewards tied to food tracking and waste reduction, reinforcing sustainability through tangible savings.
Rather than heavy gamification, motivation could be supported through lightweight progress indicators and environmental impact signals (e.g., estimated waste or emissions avoided), designed to inform and encourage without overwhelming users.
At scale, platform integrations with grocery services could automate inventory updates and shopping lists, further reducing manual effort and making sustainable choices easier to maintain over time.
Ultimately, SustainaBite demonstrates how climate-conscious design can succeed when sustainability is embedded into everyday systems—not positioned as an extra task, but as a byproduct of better defaults, clearer information, and aligned incentives.
NEXT WORK
healing patient & planet (hp&p)
a research-driven redesign of hospital food systems that restores patient dignity, reduces caregiver burden, and transforms sustainability into measurable care outcomes.
