HOPYE · PRODUCT DESIGN · SELF-INITIATED
HopYe is a concept for discovering surplus food from nearby restaurants, cafés and markets before it goes to waste.
I designed the product around a simple behavioural shift: instead of asking people to care more about food waste, make saving food feel immediately useful — affordable, local and a little bit fun.
ROLE / CONTRIBUTION
Concept · Product strategy · UX/UI · Brand identity
THE OPPORTUNITY
The problem wasn’t only food waste. It was how saving food was framed.
Existing food-saving services showed that discounted surplus food could work as a model. But I was interested in a different question: what would make someone choose it because the experience itself felt useful, desirable and fun — not simply because wasting food is bad?
Looking at existing services and everyday food habits in Turkey, I saw an opportunity to move the experience away from the language of leftovers and sacrifice, and toward freshness, value and discovery.
Three principles emerged: value over virtue, local relevance and low-friction discovery.
THE CORE INTERACTION
What if finding food to save felt a little like finding something before someone else did?
Rather than beginning with a catalogue, I made discovery the primary interaction.
Nearby offers appear as cards that can be understood in seconds: what the food is, how much is left, when it can be collected, how far away it is and what it costs. A swipe lets someone move on or act without turning every decision into a search task.
Less searching. More noticing.
FROM DISCOVERY TO DECISION
A quick interaction still has to support a real decision.
Swiping could make discovery lighter, but it couldn’t remove the information people actually needed.
Once an offer caught someone’s attention, the experience had to answer practical questions quickly: Where is it? How far away? When can I collect it? What’s in it? And is it still worth the trip?
I treated the playful interaction as the entry point — not a replacement for useful information.
THE SERVICE BEYOND THE SCREEN
Finding the food was only half the experience.
A saved meal still has to move from a business to a person.
I designed the experience around two fulfilment paths: pick it up nearby or have it delivered. That meant the digital journey had to stay connected to distance, collection windows, availability and the realities of participating businesses.
The product wasn’t only matching people with food. It was coordinating a small service around something that would otherwise disappear.
Less searching. More noticing.
BRAND AS BEHAVIOUR
Sustainability didn’t need to look serious to be taken seriously.
I wanted the product to communicate its purpose without turning every interaction into a lesson about food waste.
That shaped the brand as much as the interface: warm colours, imperfect food illustrations, playful language and packaging designed to make the act of saving food feel ordinary and enjoyable.
Sustainability was the reason it existed. It didn’t have to be the reason someone opened it.
TOTE BAG
BRAND PACKAGING
IDENTITY DETAIL
WHAT I TOOK FROM IT
The sustainable choice doesn’t always need to feel like the responsible choice.
HopYe started as a food-waste problem, but the more interesting design question became behavioural: how do you make the better choice attractive without constantly reminding people that it is the better choice?
My answer was to design around the value people could feel immediately — finding something nearby, getting a good deal and rescuing food almost as a side effect.
It’s an idea I’ve carried into later work: sometimes behaviour changes more effectively when the system makes the desired action easier and more rewarding, rather than asking people to care harder.