UTD Cupboard: Food for the Students
This project addresses the pressing issue of food insecurity among college students at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). The goal is to design a user-friendly mobile application that provides UTD students with accessible and affordable food options, tools for financial management, and connections to vital campus resources like the Comet Cupboard. By doing so, the app aims to improve student well-being and academic success.
Role: UX Researcher, UX Designer
Duration: 4 months
A look into how students navigate meals on limited time, money, and ingredients.
8 of 23 survey participants identified as students of Naveen Jindal School of Management, 6 identified as Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology, and the remaining 9 identified in other schools within UTDallas.
13 of 23 survey participants are expected to graduate in 2026.
Target Audience
My segment of interest includes UTD students, primarily undergraduates in their junior and senior years. Many of these students live off-campus, manage their finances independently, and often hold part-time jobs to cover expenses, including food. They may face challenges with budgeting, possess limited cooking skills, and experience irregular eating habits due to demanding academic and work schedules.
Key Challenges
High Prevalence and Impact of Food Insecurity
A substantial portion of students reported struggling with food access. Specifically, 27% of UTD AHT students reported having to cut meal sizes or skip meals entirely due to insufficient funds in the last 30 days, with an additional 21% experiencing hunger but unable to afford to eat. This problem impacts academic performance, mental health, and physical well-being.
Low Awareness and Stigma of Available Resources
Despite resources like the Comet Cupboard, many students are unaware of their existence or reluctant to use them. Our research indicated that only 22.2% of food-insecure students utilize on-campus food pantries, highlighting significant issues with awareness, accessibility, and the social stigma associated with seeking help.
Students didn't have the food, time, tools, or knowledge to turn it into meals.
Interviews
Interviews conducted with four UTD students shed light on various aspects of food insecurity, revealing their personal experiences, coping mechanisms, and suggestions for solutions, such as:
Financial Strain and Budgeting
While some rely on parental support or part-time jobs, others grapple with overspending on non-food items and subsequent periods of food insecurity. "I would kind of over budget spending things that I shouldn't be spending, like entertainment and clothes and stuff like that, rather than food. Or, just spend too much on food, like going out. And so I've experienced a decent amount of food insecurity probably last year."
Q: Can you talk about any experiences you've had with food insecurity since starting college?
A: I would say food plays a pretty big part. I mean, I'm eating three times a day, so I have to spend quite a bit of money, especially on groceries and stuff like that. But it does take a good chunk of my paychecks. I try to get food for the week or maybe two weeks, but everything is getting really expensive now, so it's getting more of my money.
Netnography
A netnography of Reddit posts from the UTD subreddit, focusing on food and dining, further emphasizes affordability and convenience as key concerns for students. Numerous threads discuss strategies for finding affordable food options both on and off campus, reflecting the financial challenges faced by many students. Questions about the location and operating hours of dining halls and food pantries highlight the need for readily accessible resources, especially for students with busy schedules and limited transportation options.
Literary Analysis
The secondary research provides a comprehensive understanding of food insecurity among college students, drawing on various studies and reports.
According to Govind Bhutada's "The Rising Cost of College in the U.S.", the issue stems from a confluence of factors including rising tuition costs, inadequate financial aid, and high living costs. State funding for public colleges significantly declined after the 2008 Great Recession, forcing institutions to raise tuition, which disproportionately impacted students and contributed to increased debt (Bhutada). Students' financial strain is amplified by their limited real-world budgeting experience. Other contributing factors include limited cooking skills, lack of nutrition knowledge, demanding schedules, inconvenient food pantry hours, and lack of transportation to grocery stores.
This empathy map focuses on UTD students navigating food insecurity, shedding light on their daily realities: what they see, hear, say, and do. It highlights the emotional burden, social stigma, and financial strain they face, while pointing to motivations for change and opportunities for support.
I brainstormed ways to simplify cooking with what's already on hand.
These hand-drawn wireframes visualize the core features of a student-focused pantry and food support app for the UTD Cupboard. Designed to empower students facing food insecurity, the sketches outline key functionalities.
Usability Testing
During paper prototyping sessions, particularly for "Task 1: Find Available Items," users expressed confusion and a strong desire for better organization of available items in the Comet Cupboard. A key note from testing was the need for a "Search feature to find certain items (not just scrolling)" and categories to help users navigate inventory more effectively. This direct feedback highlighted the critical importance of intuitive navigation for essential resources.
Ideas became interfaces with ingredient checklists, smart suggestions, and step-by-step guides.
Features
Enhanced Access to Comet Cupboard and Campus Food Resources
This feature provides a centralized, visible section within the app for Comet Cupboard information, including hours, contact details, and real-time item availability. This is useful because it directly addresses the low awareness and logistical barriers, making it significantly easier for students to find and utilize this crucial resource discreetly.
Linked to Comet Cupboard & User-Selected Ingredients
This feature provides a dynamic recipe section within the app that is seamlessly integrated with the Comet Cupboard's inventory. This allows users to discover simple and beginner-friendly recipes that specifically include items currently available in the pantry, thereby promoting food literacy and encouraging students to obtain and utilize these items.
Peer Support and Recipe Sharing Community
This feature creates a dedicated space for students to connect, share budget-friendly recipes (especially for Comet Cupboard ingredients), and exchange cooking tips. It's useful because it fosters a supportive community, helps reduce the stigma of food insecurity, and provides practical solutions for maximizing limited food resources, reflecting interviewees' suggestions for community cooking classes and "Free Grocery Bingo".
A student-centered mobile app prototype for UTD's Comet Cupboard, designed to streamline food pantry access, showcase inventory, suggest recipes, and foster community through forums and volunteering.
User feedback helped fine-tune a tool made to ease everyday eating.
Conclusion
The UTD Cupboard app aims to be a comprehensive solution for students facing hunger by centralizing resources, promoting financial literacy, and fostering a supportive community. By making essential food assistance more accessible and less stigmatizing, the app endeavors to improve the overall well-being and academic success of UTD students, transforming challenges into opportunities for growth and self-sufficiency.
Insights
Prioritizing Core User Needs for Resource Access
This highlights that a fundamental human-centered design principle is to first identify and directly address the most pressing, logistical barriers users face, such as low awareness and accessibility of existing resources like the Comet Cupboard.
Designing for Practicality and Immediate Problem-Solving
This demonstrates the importance of designing features that enable users to solve immediate, real-world problems with the resources they possess.
The Critical Role of Usability and Intuitive Navigation
This underlines that even well-intentioned features must be highly usable and intuitively navigable for users to adopt and benefit from them, emphasizing the iterative process of refining the user interface based on direct feedback.
Addressing Emotional and Social Dimensions of User Experience
This highlights that human-centered design must extend beyond functional utility to consider the emotional and social well-being of its users.
Integrating Life Skills Education within Functionality
This insight shows that effective UX design can incorporate educational components to empower users with valuable life skills, thereby indirectly mitigating the core problem of food insecurity.
Iterative Design Driven by Comprehensive User Feedback
The entire project, from initial secondary research and interviews to surveys and paper prototyping, was an iterative cycle of gathering and applying user feedback, demostrating continuous user input is essential for refining and validating design choices to truly meet user needs.