Comidas For Familias + UserTesting

Challenges

Comida For Familias is a young organization that just had it’s one year anniversary last September (2020). With the organization’s first year starting during COVID-19, it was still able to recruit a substantial amount of volunteers through online posts and virtual events. The organization’s main focuses are redistributing food and providing a way for the community to find resources to fill their basic needs. 

The nonprofit was inspired by Antonio Mendieta’s, Comida For Familias’ CEO, college experience. He would sometimes pass by his college’s local Pizza shop and would ask the owners if they could give him some of the leftovers instead of throwing them away. With his background in computer science he thought that there should be a way to reduce the amount of food waste if there was some way to notify people in the area that food was being thrown away. 

With the ambition of innovation and contributing to benefit the public, Comida For Familias, and its volunteers have been designing and developing applications to benefit the public. They are working on delivery applications for restaurants and food facilities to easily distribute leftover food to needy people (Needy Delivery), a mobile app where food pantry can post the schedule and the number of food available to give, and an app that detects crowded places for people to avoid to prevent the spread of COVID.

Solution

Only so much research can be done from third-party sources, and the information that you hear from the news to really fathom what the public needs. Comida For Familias, is currently leveraging UserTesting to test the projects mentioned above among food facility owners, underprivileged members of the community, and the general public. The company is focused on testing design, usability, and overall value so that when it publishes its applications, users can use it without much difficulty. 

Antonio notes that UserTesting has allowed the organization to connect with their target audience, cut back on time spent conducting in-person interviews, and has given access to detailed information on how to conduct studies on the platform to obtain the best results. “UserTesting has helped with the development of our new apps tremendously by providing us a way to easily find testers, conduct studies and share results."

Results

While Comida for Familias’ team is still in the process of developing their two projects, UserTesting has been extremely valuable in helping them hit the ground running.

Antonio notes that UserTesting has allowed the organization to connect with their target audience, cut back on time spent conducting in-person interviews, and access to more detailed information. “UserTesting has helped the development of our new apps tremendously by providing us a way to easily find testers, conduct studies, and share results.”