User Experience. Product Design. Design leadership. Product Strategy.

The Problem

Plentiful served food insecure individuals across NYC but they wanted to more intuitive user experience for their mobile app and a simpler way for the operators of food pantries and other resources to offer help. Mobile app users needed to be able to discover the aid they were qualified for, register and check-in to food distributions as well as share the information with their family members. A lot to ask from a single app!

The Solution

Working closely with the internal Plentiful development team, the engineers at Big Human and other external researchers we arrived at a product that was simple to use, tested well and required minimal structural changes to the existing back end.

I also developed a fully coded system of icons to show the differences between support distribution types that carried over into the web version as well.

The product design included social sharing, a choice between map and list feeds, and even a fully featured QR code based reservation and check-in system.

We then included the same functionality in the web app version and created a sleek interface for everyone including the most non-technical of staff to create and manage the food pantry listings.

The Result

While the final product is still being developed you can see the progress at https://www.plentiful.org. You can also experience the prototype below.