From “reduce food waste” to something households could actually use

We started with a survey of 580 people and four semi-structured interviews to understand how households planned shopping, stored food and thought about waste.

The gap between how people described themselves and what actually happened stood out. Interview participants generally felt they had good control over their groceries, but still talked about small mistakes: food forgotten in the fridge, extra trips to the store, or buying something again because no one remembered it was already at home.

The survey pointed in a similar direction. Food sitting too long in the fridge was the most common reason people gave for throwing things away, while shopping lists and checking what was already at home were already common habits.

Rather than trying to solve food waste directly, we focused on making planning and overview easier.

We narrowed Hamle down to two main functions: a shared shopping list and an overview of the food already at home. The idea was that they should work together. After a shopping trip, items could move from the list into the household inventory, giving everyone in the household the same overview and making duplicate purchases less likely.

We explored other ideas too, including profiles and food preferences, but they stayed secondary to the shopping list and inventory.

We tested an early low-fidelity prototype with four participants, made changes, then tested the revised version with a fifth. Later, five more participants tested a higher-fidelity prototype.

The tests surfaced a few very concrete problems. People mixed up the inventory and shopping list, the shopping-cart interaction was unclear, groups were harder to find than we expected, and people read the number of days in the inventory as time until expiry rather than time since purchase.

These findings gave us concrete things to fix rather than just a general sense of whether people liked the app.

The project did not have a clean handoff from design to development. While I worked on the research, interaction design and UI, the developers were building the product in parallel, and we adjusted things as both the design and the code evolved.

Hamle eventually became a working PWA built in React with Firebase and Netlify. Working this way meant making design decisions within the constraints of something that actually had to be built in a short bachelor timeline.

We piloted the finished MVP with eight participants for one week. The shared shopping list and inventory were the features people mentioned most often as useful, and participants reported somewhat better control over what they needed to buy.

A week was too short to show whether Hamle reduced food waste. The pilot suggested that the shared overview was useful, but whether that translated into less waste would have needed a much longer test.