Love the meal, hate the plastic. That’s the plight of ordering takeout while our planet is (to put it lightly) in trouble. The hopeful news is that a number of startups are attempting to tackle the increasing amount of takeout waste with returnable to-go containers for reuse. But these containers are often a pain to return. 
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I wanted to know: How can we make this model more convenient and actually sustainable for busy people? For a project to design an end-to-end mobile app, this iOS app proof of concept for Dispatch Goods—a Bay Area startup that provides diners with returnable packaging for food delivery, but does not currently have a mobile app—is our solution.

My team and I conducted a survey about returnable takeout containers and then recruited 10 people for in-depth interviews. In the survey, these 10 people said that they’re interested in the concept—making them our hypothesized target audience.

We identified five primary user problems with the model:

And in learning about the business, we uncovered one key problem:

Immediately a lightbulb went off in my head: If we can focus on making returns as easy as possible, we can potentially lower the Dispatch Goods’ loss rate—an important KPI for becoming a sustainable business—while addressing a major point of pain for those who want to reduce their takeout waste. (Not to mention in the bigger picture, it can be an opportunity to move the needle on wider cultural adoption for returnables and reusables in other applications.)

So for a Dispatch Goods mobile app, we decided to dig deeper into the problem of barriers for returning reusable containers. 

We dove deeply into who our users are to better understand their goals, needs, motivations, and frustrations in two main areas: ordering takeout and practicing sustainability. Here's what that looked like with my two teammates in FigJam:

Again, we wanted to stay focused on the subject matter of sustainability since the returns piece differentiates this app from other food delivery apps. We know that sustainability is a complex subject, and we all have different attitudes, motivations, and behaviors towards it.

Depending on the situation, people respond to their circumstances in different ways, and it's our job to design products that meet people where they are.

We used archetypes to help us do just that. This tool is the "who does what, when they do it, and why" of our user research and helps us design better experiences for people. Based on their attitudes and relationships with environmental responsibility, we divided our target audience into two main archetypes: the Eco Advocate and Eco Novice.  (Click to enlarge below!)

While both of these archetypes may face barriers to returning their takeout containers at any point, we focused on centering our design around the Eco Novice—the strongest convenience seeker—as our primary archetype. Doing so would help us design an app that's impactful and useful across many situations and contexts—not just in cases where someone is more motivated to go out of their way to keep up a sustainability practice.

Once we had a deep understanding of our users, we developed three Eco Novice points of view and accompanying problem statements, and by ranked choice voting, we landed on one that would be our design's north star.

In order to get as many ideas as possible in a short amount of time, I conducted several rounds of crazy 8s during a brainstorming session.

We then plotted our top ideas (voted as most potentially viable for our problem statement) on a prioritization matrix for feasibility and user value.

Based on what we knew about Dispatch Goods' business goals, our users' attitudes and behaviors, and the problem we set out to solve, we aligned on designing an app that rewards users for returning their takeout containers. This gave us direction in determining the key features to design in order to test and validate our Proof of Concept.

But to ground our concept, we first needed context. When would users experience the rewards, and how? We clarified how our app, realistically, would function using the following UX methods:

→ Creating a user journey map and user flows for ordering food and returning the containers to visualize the decisions, interactions, and emotions that a user could have while completing their tasks.
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→ Outlining the app's sections and navigation on a sitemap. From there, we had a clear path forward in determining an MVP's Must Haves, Nice To Haves, and what can come later, all of which we documented on a feature roadmap.

From our feature roadmap, we parsed out what we needed to design and then test to demonstrate the viability of our Proof of Concept with real users.

Using a lo-fi prototype built in Figma, we tested our most complicated flow in the Returns feature (a.k.a. our hero feature): the container Drop Off, which allows users to return their empty containers at a drop-off site (usually a participating restaurant).

We wanted to evaluate three things:
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→ Is the interaction design intuitive?
→ Is the overall flow natural, clear, and realistically feasible for completing frequently and infrequently?
→ What are the attitudes and reactions around the rewards that are triggered upon completion of the task?

The insights from this preliminary round of testing led to a pivotal iteration in our design.

We quickly realized a few critical inefficiencies and confusions with our design. While most participants appreciated earning a reward at the end of the task, the task itself required a lot of work from the user—not just in personally lugging their containers over to a drop-off site, but in the mental work the user had to do before even interacting with the app. That's a big barrier to returning we hadn't thought of yet. So we asked:

This led us to make the following changes to the Returns feature:
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1. Taking mental guesswork off the user → The feature provides users with their "balance" upfront, so they would never need to keep track of and remember how many containers they have at home and need to return.
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2. Making the process more efficient → The feature allows for a more immediate pathway to scanning at the drop-off site (users will most likely frequent one or two regular drop-off locations and wouldn't necessarily need to "find a nearby location" and go through the search process every time).

3. Giving the user more confidence in completing their drop-off → The feature has a final confirmation screen to confirm (or edit) the number of containers being dropped off before completing the task.

The Drop-Off flow went from this:

To, ultimately, this:

Our goal in our second round of usability testing was to assess whether our Proof of Concept as a whole is viable in real life, with real users. We tested both Eco Novices and Eco Advocates on their smartphones for a true-to-life experience, and all four users successfully completed the tasks of dropping off their containers and scheduling a container collection. Here were some responses:

As people and businesses collectively become more environmentally conscious and seek out solutions for living more sustainably, we can expect similar business models to continue emerging in the market. The exciting thing is, each solution in this problem space can be a great opportunity to help sustainability practices like these scale in big, meaningful ways.

At least for now, returning containers is—at the end of the day—an errand, and testing was an excellent reminder that what many people need most is help eliminating the burden of that errand as much as possible vs. incentivizing them with rewards—though rewards certainly help! After all, who wouldn't want $10 off their next takeout order?

→ See the final prototype