FRESH START PRESCHOOL KIT
Helping students and parents start the school year right.
The Fresh Start Preschool Kit is a service to provide school starter kits for pre-school children. It is a box full of school supplies, recipes, and nutrition tools. There is a complementary app to help parents use the items in the box and to register for the kit.
CONTEXT
April 2020 to June 2020 for Acumen Academy Introduction to Human-Centered Design Course
Project Brief:
How might we provide healthier food options for people in need?
Methods:
Desk Research
Contextual Observations
Expert and User Interviews
Google Maps data
Story Boarding and Personas
User Flows
Wireframing
Prototyping
Feedback Survey
Tools:
Padlet and Miro for collaboration and synthesis
Figma for prototyping
IDEO.org Design Kit
Challenges:
Accessing Users during the COVID-19 pandemic when many are required to stay at home and avoid contact with others.
Refining the large scope and defining who the target users and customers will be.
Working on a remote team. My teammate and I work in different countries and timezones.
THE APPROACH
Research
I undertook a combination of desk research into food systems, interviews, and environment observations of grocery stores, neighborhoods, and a meal giveaway in Pasadena, CA.
To inform the team on food deserts, food and nutrition policy initiatives, and inspiration from analogous industries and challenges, desk research was carried out. Due to social distance and time constraints, we conducted interviews with people in our network, including a parent, a teacher, and a social worker. Contextual observations were conducted, via a car, to observe a meal give away for the homeless at a Pasadena park. Google Maps was used to find food options around a local elementary school and the park where the meal giveaway occurred.
These research methods helped to understand the range of people who try to access food and their daily environments. These methods reduced our physical interactions with other people during the COVI-19 pandemic.
Interesting insights from the research included:
Food desert communities are where residents are more than 1 mile from fresh produce. Low-income neighborhoods tend to coincide with food deserts.
A person may have access to food, but not food storage and preparation space impacting one’s capability to consume and use fresh produce.
Knowledge and habits are important in developing healthy habits and consuming healthy food.
 Pasadena Map.png |  CentralPark1-1024x576.jpg |  Delevan Drive Map.png |
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Synthesis
We used Padlet and Miro for team synthesis and ideation. Thematic analysis was conducted by clustering all the insights from all the research.
From the data, 3 key themes emerged:
The power of habit in affecting healthy food decisions.
There is a lack of food and nutrition education.
Environmental factors affect accessibility to buy and prepare food.
From this activity, the original design challenge of providing healthier food options for people in need expanded into 3 more focused design questions:
How Might We help families shift their food consumption towards healthier habits rather than changing habits completely?
How Might We promote nutrition in an entertaining way to help with food education?
How Might We enable a nomadic food system for low-income families?
Based on this research, we decided to focus on a solution for children, and pre-school children because there is a gap in common public services available for this demographic. Also, from the research, creating healthy habits with children can help them to have healthy habits as adults reducing lifestyle health issues.
With this in mind, we moved into ideation.
Ideation
Based on the refined questions, I led an ideation session resulting in dozens of ideas between the two of us. Similar ideas were clustered together and then a vote was held, resulting in a top 4 ideas.
These ideas were narrowed down to 2 which were called Second Meals and Fresh Start Box. A large factor for choosing these ideas was that they would be able to serve a greater range of people and can fit into services and organizations that children and their parents regularly interact with, schools and restaurants.
Second Meals is for an app that shows restaurants providing meals at free or reduced prices. At restaurants designated as healthy, EBT/food stamps customers could receive an extra discount and use their EBT/food stamps to pay. Fresh Start Box provides a box for school children at the start of school with school supplies, lunch boxes, and healthy recipes. It includes nutrition and development information along with healthy recipes and community resources.
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Prototyping
To further select-down, we created storyboards to demonstrate how key users would use each idea. We decided to continue with the Fresh Start Box.
We choose the Fresh Start Box because further research revealed similar services such as Too Good To Go and Fresh EBT. Though similar services for babies are available in some US states and European countries, we did not find one for small school children like Fresh Start Box. The closest food services for children, besides food banks, were school meal programs that usually start at the primary/elementary level.
Our hypothesis was that the Fresh Start Box would teach children healthy habits that they could take into adulthood. To reach the market users of parents and young children, distribution of the boxes through public schools would be best.
To test interest amongst users and to uncover key features and information, I sketched user flows and initial wireframes that I used to develop an app prototype on Figma. Then, we conducted a feedback survey targeting parents and childcare takers in our network. We renamed The Fresh Start Box to Fresh Start Preschool Kit.
 Copy of 128c6899722087.5ef9670846ecf.jpg |  Fresh STart Storyboard.png |  WhatsApp Image 2020-05-29 at 09.34.18 (1 |
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 WhatsApp Image 2020-05-29 at 09.34.18.jp |  Second App Storyboard.png |
RESULTS AND NEXT STEPS
Though we obtain a small sample, the initial feedback survey results revealed a positive interest in the Fresh Start Preschool Kit. The respondents reported that they would use and were enthusiastic about the kit. Interestingly, they thought the information on how to register for the box and the meal planner were some of the most important features, after the box itself.
Some suggestions from the feedback survey for improving the idea were:
Sometimes the app was too text-heavy
A website would also be a helpful supplement to the app
The registration information was easy to follow.
Based on the feedback, I am currently designing a website for the app. The website will provide more detailed information on the items in the box, nutrition, and community resources to help streamline the information on the app. You can check the progress here.
The project has concluded. However, steps to improve the project and to bring Fresh Start Preschool Kit to life would follow:
Obtaining initial estimates of the items for the box to develop a budget for the program.
Collaborating with nutritionists and child development specialists to ensure content is correct and up to date.
Working with school district officials and city council members to further test interest, feasibility, and possible operation.
 Registration info.png |  Website 1.PNG |  Website 2.PNG |
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