Women Infants and Children (WIC) is a supplemental nutrition program designed to help lower-income families afford healthy foods and childcare consumables. Working in collaboration with a team of designers, we employed creative approaches to get a better picture of the experience of those who use or have used the WIC program. Through multiple interviews with WIC users, exploring WIC’s own website, deep dives through a plethora of frugality and motherhood-related subreddits, and through the reviews of several WIC-related apps on Apple’s app store and Google Play, we found a number of common pain points across several types of user. While there were plenty of issues we could have focused on, such as difficulty finding WIC-approved items in stock, embarrassment using WIC card at cash registers, or even difficulty receiving and maintaining WIC recipient status, our team decided to task problems to each person, conquering them individually with our own systems. With this decision, I decided to focus on the difficulty of finding the extra time to search for WIC items and plan meals given the busy schedule that many WIC parents are either single mothers working full time, foster parents who can’t take parental leave from jobs, or simply two parents who both have to work in order to make ends meet.

Considering the issues of working around schedules, it made sense that a pre-scheduled delivery method might be the best approach, and for those who have little time to plan as well creating pre portioned ingredients for included recipes would not only remove the stress of planning and time spent prepping, but would also reduce food waste and allow busy parents to spend more time with their children. Based on competitive market analysis of similar meal prep delivery systems such as Blue Apron, HelloFresh and EveryPlate, I created an onboarding system to allow WIC users to curate a weekly delivery of meal ingredients that fit their family size, dietary preferences and fall within their approved WIC products list. I focused on the process once the user has already obtained a WIC benefits card, allowing the user to scan their card using their phone camera, removing the confusion and ambiguity of selecting items covered by their plan. After completing the onboarding process, users have the option to keep up to date with recipes in their upcoming order, as well as an profile tab to change their preferences, pause their order or contact WIC Box if any issues arise with delivery, benefits and more. Creating WIC Box was an inspiring challenge given the focus on solving problems within an existing system. The research portion definitely fostered my love of user research and has since made me view the issues I see in systems around me as puzzles that can be solved using empathetic design systems and interfaces.