HungerFree

HungerFree was a rapid UX/UI hackathon project focused on food insecurity. Working with a team of three other designers over four days, I helped shape a digital concept aimed at making healthy, nutritious food more accessible while keeping the experience empathetic, clear, and grounded in real user needs.

Role

Research

To move quickly while still grounding the project in lived experience, we combined surveys and interviews to better understand how people navigate food access, barriers, and support systems.

Research Outputs

From that research, we identified major themes, reviewed competitors and comparators, built personas, and developed a focused problem statement to guide the design direction.

Problem Definition

Problem Statement

Stacy needs a resourceful way to access healthy and nutritious food due to limited socioeconomic options and barriers.

How Might We

We translated our findings into a “How Might We” framework that kept the concept practical, user-centered, and appropriately scoped for the project timeline.

Next Steps

• Review icon choices through A/B testing
• Create an encrypted texting capability within the app
• Expand the concept to support additional communities in need

Reflection

HungerFree reinforced how much can be accomplished in a short time when research, synthesis, and design decisions stay tightly connected. The project was less about building a perfect solution and more about creating a thoughtful, realistic intervention shaped by actual user needs.

Overview

This project came out of a four-day UX/UI hackathon centered on social impact. Our team selected food insecurity as the issue we wanted to address, with the goal of designing a realistic digital experience rather than pretending to solve an enormous systemic problem all at once.

We focused on one practical question: how might technology support people trying to access nutritious food while navigating socioeconomic barriers, limited resources, and everyday constraints?

Design Approach

Visual Decisions

Our team intentionally avoided warm tones because research suggested they can stimulate appetite. Since the app was designed for people already experiencing food insecurity, we wanted the interface to feel calm and supportive instead of visually intensifying that tension.

Accessibility

We added text labels to icons to reduce interpretation load and improve accessibility through redundancy, making the interface easier to understand at a glance.