Fruito - an universal fruits management tool for kids and adults

Year

2015

Role

Founding Designer

Company

Fruito

Fruito is a fruit management app. I worked with an engineer friend for two months from ideation to launch. We aimed small but dreamed big - No black banana, a happier life.
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It is supposed to be used by everyone - no matter what language you speak and no matter how old you are.
Fruito is not a successful app, yet - 20+ downloads with no marketing before we took it off the app store. However, I kind of achieved the goal because Fruito is loved by my mom who only speaks Maderian and my 5 years old nephew :)

01_CHALLENGE

Black banana is the last straw

Back in 2015, 8 million people lived in New York, 40% of adult renters are living with a roommate, I, at that time, lived with 5, which means, 6 of us share one fridge. So when I pulled my black bananas out of the refrigerator with a desperate howl the third time that month, I decided to do something.

02_RESEARCH & VALIDATION

Fruits are not fried chicken and coke

I started to interview my roommates and classmates to get more clues about fruit thrown away experience. Over half of interviewees admitted they bought fruits because they want to eat healthy. Almost everyone would feel they were wasting time and money when they throw fruits away.
To fulfill our desire of eating healthy, buying fruits but not eating them before they go bad becomes a common story.

Coming up with more goal-oriented questions

With so many different sad stories with fruits, how could I find a way to sort them? My 5 year old nephew inspired me with his math homework.

So any reasons encouraging purchasing or discouraging eating, storing and reusing could cause fruit wastes.
The answers are categorized as below—

The problems I am trying to solve are:
1. How to purchase a reasonable amount of fruits?
2. How to keep fruits fresh longer?
3. How to eat more fruits and eat often?
4. How to reuse fruits?

03_GOAL DEFINITION & METRICS

Improve fruits management experience for everyone, everywhere

As people interact with fruits at various locations, people should be able to use the tool anywhere.
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buying fruits — grocery stores
storing fruits — home
eating fruits — home/work/on the way
throw fruits — home
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So I decided to design an app since people could use it everywhere.
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The app would help people with fruits management by giving full control of the fruits to users and here are the key functions-
1. Pre-hint about fruit purchasing
2. Keep tracking of storing fruits
3. More fun to eat fruits
4. Tips for fruit reuse

04_WIREFRAMES

Flow, wireframes, testing, iterations

I created several prototypes to test out, then narrowed down to one to dig deeper. With displaying seasonal fruits on the home screen to tap, “it’s intuitive and fun” according to the user.

Although, I also got complaints about inputting the data - “It’s too much work to input the amount of the fruits and hard to tell the status of the fruits.”
So how to improve the inputting part? How important is the status of the fruits?

How to improve the inputting part?

1. Record fruits purchase with camera

To record fruits purchase, I proposed three ideas. After several testing with my engineer, we chose manual entry since it was stable and reliable.
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2. Mobile friendly first
Testing out 3 layouts, only the very right one can be operated by one hand. After discussing with the engineer, we chose the middle one since it required less time and performed better than the left one.