Digitizing the National School Lunch Program

Commonly known as the "free and reduce lunches," the National School Lunch Program is a part of the USDA that works to ensure that every pre-college student in the country has food to eat during the school day. As a part of the E.A.T. Lunch UX Challenge by DevPost, our team (two UX/IxD designers and two developers) worked to redesign how the experience and the interaction would look and feel. 

The Prompt

Devpost hosts hack-a-thons which are geared towards back-end developers, but the rules for this competition incorporated front end user experience evaluation as well. The purpose of this competition was "to develop a forward-looking, web-based application form using personalized behavioral prompts, UX best practices, and edit-checks to assist in accurate form completion." 

To uphold a user-centered approach, we began by talking to real people.

My role: research, visual & interaction design

Timeline: 10 weeks

Real People; Real Use

Engaging with real users helped us realign on our design throughout our process. We made sure to talk with people who have either previously registered using the forms or who would need to register in the near future.

12 People, including:

• Mothers and Fathers
• Grandparents
• Legal guardians
• Public assistants

Our rounds of user research held separate purposes:

• Generative, informational interviews (4 people)
• Usability test with low fidelity prototypes (4 people)
• Usability test with high fidelity prototypes (4 people)

One thing became clear when talking to people: government forms contain too many ambiguous terms. We found that labels were interpreted in many ways, and the form provided little assistance in clarifying concerns. Income proved to be the most challenging to define for our participants.

This transformed into our primary design goal: choosing labels and appropriate front-end graphics to make information as easy to understand as possible.

Final Design