Syracuse University Food Service

Based on the student population report, Syracuse University is an international school with more than 4000 foreign students from about 130 countries, which is about 20% of the total students in 2017. The hectic school life doesn’t allow many students to prepare their food at home. According to our data collected, more than 70% of the students will have food at dining center on campus at least once a week and 31% of the students eat at school cafeteria every weekday. So the access to healthy, affordable and culturally appropriate food is essential to student’s development of both school and personal life.

Here are some hypotheses we come up with:
‍
• Most students are not aware of the nutrition facts or the food quality when they have food in dining center.
• For students with special eating habits in religions and cultures, like Kosher, Halal, Indian and Chinese, the food on campus doesn’t response their needs in a proper way.
• The food price offered at dining center is a little overpriced for students as many of them have no income yet.

Because we wanted to use research methods as a tool to get knowledge and support our hypotheses through findings, we took Research for Design methodology as our strategy and applied several research methods including internet research, online survey, on-site interview and field studies.

The term research for design is understood to mean research that is carried out during the overall design process to support designing in whatever way they designer(s) regard as useful and this includes research intended to provide information and data that is necessary to successfully conclude the undertaking in question. A good alternative term would be research to enable design.
‍
— Peter Downton, Design Research

We did an online research and field studies to gain a general overview of all the dining centers on campus.  There are 28 dining centers and cafeterias on campus. Then we found that some dining places were offering more options in food than we initially thought. There was even an individual Kosher Dining room located in one of the dining places where we'd never been. The field studies helped us to get information from the real world setting that the online research couldn't provide.

Next, we also needed to hear the voice of the students. I took charge of designing and validating the questions on the survey and made sure those questions enable reflecting student’s perspective and attitude. 5-point Likert-type scales anchored at “worst” (1) to “best” (5) were adopted for some of the questions that required student’s evaluation. We also asked if they had interest in participating in the incoming focus group in the consent form page at the beginning.

At the end of recruitment, we had 72 valid samples to forward the data analysis phase.

Here’s the survey designed in Google Forms.

Google Forms could export CSV file that I was able to import to R studio for data analysis. After the data munging, I had a small dataset of 72 instances and 15 columns. To have a basic understanding of the data collected, I did some descriptive data analysis. Here's an overview:

78% of the students were undergraduates.

Students were from 26 majors. (We talked with professors from nutrition and public health majors and they helped us with distributing the survey so we had most students from those two majors)

More than half of the participants stayed over 6 hours on campus per day.

Almost half of the participant spent $5-$10 per meal.

Then, I also did some multivariate analysis to find the correlation between the above variables and generated several two-dimensional data visualization.

Among all three degrees, the satisfaction scores on food quality were above the middle level which means most students had a positive view on food quality. But Master students’ perspective were more diverse than the other two.

Master and Ph.D. students would like to spend more money on each meal than undergraduate students.

Undergraduates had more options in terms of where to have food than the other two degrees. (Each color represents a dining center or cafeteria)

Most students spent $5-10 per meal. In general, the more money spent, the higher positive score student would give.

I also created a word cloud to reflect student’s review on the food service. Some keywords included “options”, “healthy”, “better” and “free” which showed that student thought there was still room to improve.

Most students, especially Masters and Ph.D. were not aware of how many places they could go to eat on campus. In addition, the food service department was continually seeking feedback from students to improve their service but had not many responses. So the main problem is to reinforce mutual communication between students and the food service department.

Our solution focused on enlarging the access of information, rather than the food itself. SU food service already had an Instagram account with 400 followers and we considered Instagram was a great way to approach students. This IG campaign would start at the beginning of each semester and end within the first month. We delivered three components including campaign protocols, IG contest and posters. I designed the protocol based on Syracuse University social media practice guideline. We also came up with some popular hashtags could be used in each IG post and also set up the rule for each post. To encourage more user-generated content, we implemented Post a Picture Contest (SU food services IG account re-post one related post from students and tag their names) and IG Giveaways (Every participant have the chance to win the SU food ticket) One teammate(Frank) created graphic posters to draw attention for this IG campaign as well.

‍Team collaboration is significantly important, especially there’s a lot of work to do in a complex project.
‍I joined the team as a user researcher and team coordinator. Even I used to work as a designer, the other three students were all from the Design major so they were more professional in terms of the pixel-perfect design. So I took the initiative of the data collection and data analysis work and they did their best in visual design part.