Cooking Buddy

The Design Process

Challenge #1

Cooking is a “foreign” topic to me. I am the type of guy who enters the kitchen with the basic know-how of cooking instant noodles with cheese tofus as my best dish.

How can a guy with limited cooking experience, design a mobile app that enhances users’ cooking experience?

Solution #1

User Research

User Interviews

I conducted user interviews with 7 users with cooking experience to understand the end to end cooking process and uncover their needs and frustrations in each touchpoint.

Contextual Inquiry

I performed a contextual inquiry on a user to observe the entire cooking process and to get a better understanding and context of the cooking process.

With the user research insights, I was able to map out the end to end cooking process.

Challenge #2

As a person who doesn't cook, I am surprised that it is rigmarole to prepare home-cooked food. The end to end cooking process consist of 6 phases, it starts from the search for cooking inspiration and recipe hunt,  planning for meals, grocery shopping for ingredients, food preparation, cooking and cleaning up.

With the tight project schedule of 2 weeks, it is too broad a scope to undertake if I was to cover the end to end cooking process.

Solution #2

Prioritizations

I needed to narrow down the project scope. I decided to prioritise and focus on 3 out of 6 phases of the cooking process. The phases that i chose to work on are:

1. Search for cooking inspiration and recipe hunt

2. Food preparation

3. Cooking

My thoughts for prioritisation are:

1. Identify and weigh key user needs associated with each phase in the end to end cooking process

2. Focus on the phases that are able to make the most impact to user’s cooking experience that is within the reach of a mobile application.

Research Synthesis

I used affinity mapping to synthesise the research findings. Insights were grouped and analysed.

What users were saying

• Users would want the recipes to be more comprehensive.

  “Sometimes the recipes are very vague and incomplete”

  “Recipes do not have the picture reference”

• Users need help with the cooking instructions.

  “Instructions are too complicated”

  “I will miss out some steps, by the time I realised it, it was too late”

• Users have queries regarding the cooking process.

  “I need to know the substitute for my ingredients”

  “I can’t tell if the dish is cooked properly”

Problem Definition

User Persona

To further empathise with the users, a user persona was formulated to represent users with varying goals, needs and frustrations.

Jane Lim is an intermediate cook who enjoys cooking and like to learn how to cook new dishes.

Problem Statement

I came up with a problem statement to better articulate my persona’s needs.

Solutions to the problems

HMW (How-Might-We)

With the problem statement defined, I developed 2 HMWs as seeds of my ideation.

1. HMW address users’ queries about the cooking process.

2. HMW provides users with an easy-to-follow & comprehensive cooking recipes.

Concept 1

From my user interviews, I understood that many queries can arise while cooking. So I thought to myself, how could I address a dynamic range of queries?

The first thing that came into my mind was the questions & answer website, Quora. With that as my inspiration, I came out with my concept.

Concept 2

Most of the recipes out in the market are either in textual with picture or video format. The issue with textual with picture format is that it may not be comprehensive (i.e instruction may be vague, missing steps). As for videos, it is hard for users to pinpoint to the exact cooking step and they usually have to playback the specific part to capture all the details of a particular step.

Interactive Prototype

With the key design solution concepts in mind, I developed the Mid-Fi interactive prototype to illustrate the key application features. This prototype was used in the usability test and to facilitate design improvements.

Usability Test

I conducted a usability test to evaluate the key concepts and identify usability issues with the prototype.

The usability test participants took on Jane’s persona after I gave them the contextual scenario. They were briefed for each task and they interacted with the prototype and attempted to complete the given tasks.

Design Improvements

At the end of each usability test, I did a short post-test interview with my participants checking if my solutions were able to address the identified problems. Overall, all my participants agreed that the features were able to solve the problems. However, they did point out some usability issues with the prototype.

Two major feedbacks and design improvements are summarised as follows.

1. Participants needed a faster response to their queries

2. Participants found it hard to access information in the recipe page

Meet Your Cooking Buddy

What’s Next

With every project, there’s always room for improvement. Given more time, I would love to conduct more usability tests to validate my iterated design.

Given the time constraint, the project scoped was narrowed down and focused primarily on a few phases of the end-to-end cooking process. In the future expansion of the app, I would like to look into bridging the gap between the shopping of ingredients and cooking.

Reflections

As a UX designer, I have the natural urge to solve all the problems that I identified. However, due to time limitation, it is critical for me to time box, narrow down the scope and focus on the priorities. Always tackle the prioritised features first and work on the least prioritised feature in future iterations.