Food waste has become a serious matter which negatively impacts the environment worldwide. This raises the issue of managing food waste more efficiently, which in many cases can be aided with technology, and there has been previous research suggesting possible solutions. On a household level, food waste could be better managed by providing individuals with visual representations or summaries of how much they waste, and hopefully motivating them to waste less. However, typicalcharts used for visualizing data often fail to motivate users. Abstract visualizations might have a better chance at doing so. The focus of this master thesis is to design and develop a responsive web application which helps users keep track of their food purchases. Using the application, users can create product lists and perform two actions on products: consuming and wasting. The app prototype aims to increase an individual’s motivation towards wasting less food by providing a virtual “tree” visualization with similar features to a real tree such as branches and leaves. However, instead of growing depending on its’ environment like a real tree would, this virtual “tree” representation would grow based on the user’s actions: subject to how much food is consumed or wasted, the virtual tree will grow further or gradually start withering. A user study was conducted which involved a questionnaire surveying the general attitudes and practices of the participants regarding their household food waste, which was sent to participants both before and after using the resulting prototype.This enabled for relevant comparisons to be made between the user attitudes before and after trying the prototype. Furthermore, at the end of study, two user groups could be identified: most active participants and less active participants. This classification was made based on the activity logs gathered from the application database, where “most active” refers to participants that used the application regularly during the evaluation period and “less active” means the participants with very little or no activity recorded in the database. A final questionnaire was developed in two variants for collecting user feedback, tailored for the two groups identified: most active participants and less active participants. These surveys were shared with a group of participants who had agreed on using the resulting prototype for a period of at least two weeks. The results of the user study suggested that users were positive to the concept of the prototype and most users showed a keen interest in future improvements of the application. It is hoped that this work makes a relevant contribution to the areas of household food waste management, digital inventories, and web technologies, specifically web applications.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-123025 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Mitu, Alexandra |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för datavetenskap och medieteknik (DM) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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