Design Impact and Future Thinking
Impact of my Design
If FoodCoup was to be fully built out and turned into a real product, it would serve as an effective solution to the problem of rising food prices. FoodCoup has the potential to significantly improve the financial well-being of its users by providing them with easy access to coupons and essential grocery items. By enabling users to quickly and easily search for coupons and offers from a variety of retailers and brands, the app helps them stretch their budgets and make their hard-earned dollars go further.
Next Steps
Moving forward, my design solution could be made more functional and robust by implementing more features that exist outside the primary task flow I focused on. Specifically, adding the ability to create a new grocery list from within the app, adding items from the home page to your list, and searching for coupons from specific stores are all suggestions that users made during usability testing. Implementing those features and expanding my app would help it become even more useful for individuals with different goals and motivations.
Key Learnings
- Always trust the process. Getting ahead of yourself and focusing too much on the big picture can take away from smaller, yet vital aspects of the design process.
- Keep and open mind. At the start of this project I wasn’t very passionate or motivated by my problem space. However, persevering and working through each phase of the design process step by step helped me to create an innovative solution that I’m very happy with and proud of.
- Give yourself time. Throughout this capstone project I experienced just how much work goes into creating a design solution from start to finish and learned that to do something well, you’ll almost always need more time than you think.
Future Thinking
What feedback would the environment give about your product?
This product has the potential to make a positive environmental impact by reducing the need for and use of physical flyers and coupons.
What happens when 100 million people use your product?
If FoodCoup gained a large user base, there is potential for increased competition to form between grocery stores. If lots of people are using the app and find that certain stores have the best deals, buying habits will shift to those stores. In turn, more expensive stores may be encouraged to lower their prices or offer more deals in order to retain customers.