Fostering Sustainable Food Acquisition: Designing for Trust, Transparency, and Sustainability

Across two studies, I investigated how people learn about sustainability and how digital platforms can support safe, transparent, and sustainable food practices. Findings informed design implications for e-commerce platforms and marketing strategies that build trust, foster local food networks, and support long-term sustainable choices.

Project A: Information Snowballing

  • Objective: Understand how everyday consumers expand sustainability knowledge in daily life.
  • Methods:
    pre-screening phone calls;
    In-depth interviews with 9 participants;
    photo diaries and elicitation technique;
    grounded theory analysis.
  • Key Findings: People “snowball” knowledge over time through social media, NGOs, and embodied experiences; places like grocery stores and gardens serve as “information landscapes” to foster informal learning.
  • Impact: Informs UX design to embed sustainability cues into everyday touchpoints (labels, dashboards), and support progressive learning pathways.

Project B: Online Food Delivery with Live-Streaming Farms

  • Objective: Explore how online food delivery (OFD) services can address food safety and trust while supporting local farms and merchants.
  • Methods:
    online surveys;
    9 interviews;
    high-fidelity prototype (Backyard app internal link to UX project);
    usability testing and card-sorting with 11 participants.
  • Key Findings: Trust concerns outweighed sustainability cues; live-streaming farms and restaurants increased transparency by showing food freshness, animal welfare, and kitchen practices.
  • Impact: Provides design directions for OFD platforms to rebuild trust through transparency and promote sustainable, local consumption.

Combined Impact

Together, these projects show how UX research can foster sustainable food acquisition by:

  • Supporting knowledge growth and behavior change in everyday practices.
  • Designing transparent, trust-building digital tools.
  • Bridging local food systems with digital platforms.

Publications

Du, X. and Costello, K.L. (2025), Information snowballing: information practices in the context of sustainable food practices", Journal of Documentation, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2024-0200

Du, X., Polkinghorne, S., Ocepek, M., & Costello, K. (2023). Building a Bigger Table: Food Research, Methods, Policy, and Action in Library and Information Science. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 60(1), 766-769. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.857

Du, X. (2022). Transitioning Towards Sustainability: The Information Practices of Sustainable Food Consumers. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 59(1), 675-677. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.687

Du, X., and Kim, S. (2021). Exploring an Opportunity to Support Local Food Systems through Online Food Delivery Services with Live-Streaming Farms in China. Adjunct Publication of the 23rd International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 1-6). https://doi.org/10.1145/3447527.3474859