Yena Kim

Fun with Food is a mobile application that encourage food insecure single parents in Los Angeles to cook healthy meals for their families while also promoting healthier eating habits for children with fun mobile cooking games.

‍Research has shown that food insecurity for families with children was at 14.8% compared to those without children at 8.8%. That’s nearly a double the amount. 332,000 families with children were either hungry or skipped meals; and 20.4% of those food insecurities come from being jobless due to Pandemic. There are many different underlying reasons on why food insecurity becomes a problem. Single parents are often working full time jobs resulting in lack of time; and lack of income per month could really hurt families with nutritious and quality family time. And while there are programs available out there that these families could use to get some assistance, it’s not always readily available or the process of obtaining the help could take months and be stressful.​​​​​​​

‍Design team scheduled interviews with two different single mothers, Lee Puckhaber and Scarlet Carter to gain more insights on this problem. Lee, 44 years old, single mother of 2 children: Rylee (23) and Hayes (6) told us about how insecure she felt feeding her first child and often had to pre-order groceries in order to save time. Scarlet, 23 years old, single mother of Elliot; feels that she just does not have enough time with her son. One of the quotes that stuck with us was, “I definitely feel like I never have enough time with my kid.. But I understand that it’s my responsibility to be able to financially support myself and my son”. Scarlet mentioned that while her son is extremely picky with food, she was able to have a breakthrough moment when they started cooking together, giving him courage to try new things.

‍The solution was Fun With Food, a mobile application that allows parents to cook healthy and delicious meals with pantry-provided foods for the whole family. Fun With Food is a free application that directly partners with local food banks to provide fresh produce and groceries for food insecure families residing in Los Angeles. It allows a detailed personalization to accommodate the specific food niche and preferences while also providing easy to follow recipes with the products that are provided in the box. However, what makes this application unique is that it also provides a fun cooking game for children based on the weekly recipes that are provided. There are achievements for each finished step, motivating children to be involved in the food prepping process safely while also sparking interest to try a variety of food. Fun with Food can save time, allow families to bond, and most importantly, address stigma surrounding low income allowing people to feel comfortable while reaching out for help.

CicLAvia is a non profit organization located in Los Angeles catalyzing on vibrant public spaces, active transportation, and good health through car free streets. Our new digital experience, Unlock Your City, is a digital map and local guide that can also live on the web page of CicLAvia providing the attendees with an enhanced digital map and list of businesses. With the new map created on Proxi, it allows cleaner UI with filtering system, easier navigation, and simpler form of updates making it both useful for users and CicLAvia staff. It also provides a list of businesses including restaurants, shops, and point of interests allowing event attendees to explore what is around while traveling on the route. Unlock Your City is a digital map created on Proxi making both useful for users and CicLAvia staff. Proxi allows cleaner UI with a filtering system, easier navigation, and simpler form of updates. It also provides a list of businesses including restaurants, shops, and point of interests allowing event attendees to explore what is around while traveling on the route.

While CicLAvia is a great open street event for all, they always faced a struggle of trying to let users be more involved in their digital space and improve the user's experience on their online platform. CicLAvia’s current digital space has two major problems: the map and the story telling. Current map on CicLAvia’s website uses google maps which had an overwhelming amount of spots making it harder to see, the map was small and when embedded onto their website, it was cut off. Additionally, locations were not properly updated, and it was extremely difficult to find their interactive digital on the current website. They were also lacking in storytelling. During the interview with CicLAvia’s staff, they expressed the importance of highlighting the local business they were on the event route. However, with their current format made it difficult to highlight the different businesses and many users have not even seen the list.

A Lack of Information Left Users Feeling Lost: User research and interviews have shown that the community loved CicLAvia and many were frequent visitors of CicLAvia’s monthly events. What the event attendees didn’t enjoy was a lack of information making them feel lost. During the conversation with attendees, many expressed that they felt lost while walking the route. There were no clear directions provided and lack of map made it harder to know what’s coming up next. Some of the key pain points were the distance to the next hub; location of water stations, bathrooms, bike repairs; and places to check out while walking the route. Users Don’t Know About the Interactive Map (Therefore It Might As Well Not Exist): Design team conducted a user survey during CicLAvia’s Heart of LA event on October 9th; and out of the 43 attendees interviewed, 66% answered that they had been to previous CicLAvia events and loved it. However, 77% answered that they had never seen CicLAvia's interactive map prior to attending the events; and 90% answered that they would enjoy it if more information was provided.

The solution was Unlock your city, a whole new digital experience for CicLAvia attendees with our new interactive map and local guide. During our last event at South LA, the design team traveled the route with QR code and helped users get access to our map and list. New digital map for CicLAvia was created with Proxi, a cleaner and easier to use mapping software. Users can filter different points on the map by Hubs, restaurants, shops, points of interests, restrooms and more. Event attendees can also find their current location on the map knowing the distance to their next destination. Another addition was a list of businesses on the route. While the users scroll down the list of businesses, they can filter by different categories to find what’s around them.