How might we provide healthier food options for people in need?
IDEO.org Challenge
Skills
Workshop Facilitation, Context Immersion, Interview Guide Creation, User Interviews, Synthesis, Storyboarding, Prototyping, Create a Pitch
Role
Service Designer, Researcher
Tools
Paper, Markers, Canva
Research
Context Immersion
Users: Shift Workers - workers who often find themselves working long, odd hours
What are the options for a hospital worker late at night?
Using a 1 mile radius around a hospital in a suburban area, I found few options for healthy food or food at all. The closest option was a CVS, where the shelves were mostly empty. Further out a Subway sandwich shop and a hamburger joint were the only fast food options, and both were closed.
User Interviews
Our user interviews included a nurse, a truck driver, and a police officer, each worked long hours, had inconsistent schedules, and few opportunities for breaks.
These were our key takeaways:
Nurse
When she first started, she worked the night shift and ate a lot of fast food.
Exhaustion at the end of shifts was something that influenced her eating habits.
Her choice to eat and purchase healthy foods has been influenced by her husband, since he’s taken the lead on shopping and cooking in their household.
“Going to the grocery store can be physically and mentally exhausting, which is basically impossible to take on after a physically and mentally exhausting day of work without a break.”
Truck Driver
Convenience mattered to him more than anything else. For him, time is money.
Since he travels a lot, and finds himself in different cities, obtaining healthy food means going out and searching for it, which means fewer deliveries, and less income for the day.
Healthy foods and eating a healthy diet has never been a priority for him, and he doesn’t seem to have any interest in changing his eating habits to try and incorporate more healthy food.
Police Officer
He looked for a balance of healthy eating and convenience. When he has the opportunity, he likes to cook at home with his wife, and he finds that he only ends up eating about 1 meal a day at work.
Because of his schedule, he sometimes only ends up eating 1 meal a day, which affects his appetite the next day.
He generally stores his lunch in the car until he’s able to eat, so that can be limiting when bringing food from home. He also mentioned things being easy to eat on the go, and inexpensive as a regular part of his routine.
Identifying Insights
Interview Synthesis
As we debriefed the interviews, we gathered observations and quotes on sticky notes By identifying the most insightful and interesting notes, we formed themes which we used to create the following insights.
Insight 1: Access to a break is more important than access to healthy food
Not having time for breaks throughout the day prevented our users from consuming healthy food (and participating in other healthy habits, like drinking enough water and taking bathroom breaks. Breaks could be costly, or impossible due to understaffing leading to a need for the quickest option possible.
When asked if he would choose a healthy food truck if it existed, the truck driver responded, “If that was the shortest line”
Our users also experienced a physical and mental toll from working long hours, and constantly having to make on the spot decisions. They didn’t have time time to process what was going on at work, let alone think about your own needs. Without time to think or process, workers were often stuck in a reactionary mindset. Without time to think or process any decisions, decision making around food became a difficult chore.
How might we incentivize companies to build breaks into a work day?: Recognizing that there are a lot of barriers to breaks, some at a very high level, and some at a more personal level.
Insight 2 : People follow their routines and go for the same foods and places. Providing options for new ways to access healthy foods given their context could be helpful
Time is a scarcity. Our users often visited the same fast food places or routinely ate the same lunch to save time. Most respondents prioritized convenience and accessibility over health when choosing what to eat, viewing food as fuel so that they can get along with the rest of the day.
How might we help workers learn about their peers’ healthy routines?
Insight 3: Creating positive spheres of influence.
People’s diets are strongly influenced by family and friends. Most respondents prioritized healthier food when it was also a priority for their family and friends.
The nurse had been positively influenced by her husbands healthy eating habits, and his willingness to take on the responsibility for meals at home. The truck driver, lives alone and did not have a sphere of family and friends encouraging him to eat healthy, which didn’t give him much reason to change his habits.
How might create positive spheres of influence for those without family and friends supporting that behavior?
Notes captured by our team during our interview debrief.
Ideation
We brainstormed around each of our insights and came up with ideas ranging from “Tinder for Healthy Habits”, an app that would help people to build a support system for recipe sharing, encouragement, and accountability for making healthier choices, to partnering with local companies to provide vouchers for healthy restaurants, helping to remove some of the barriers we had identified.
Storyboard and Prototype
We storyboarded and prototyped “Take Lunch Off Your To-Do List”, a meal service that was integrated into an already busy work day.
A sign up sheet would be posted in an area that a worker already frequents during the day. By lowering the burden of choice to something more manageable during a busy day, and reducing the cost as much as possible, we hoped that this service would help to break down some of the barriers to healthy options.
We planned to partner with local restaurants to allow for some variety from week to week, while limiting choice enough that it won’t feel like a burden.
By deducting the cost from a worker’s paycheck, they don’t have to worry about hunting a purse or wallet during their shift, they simply check a box at a station and go on with their day until the food arrives.