Slice
Help solo cookers to reduce waste, save time and connect with the community
My role
Research, UX design, Interaction design
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Qualtrics, Usertesting.com
Team Member
Rachel, AndrewT, Dyvia, Ayantu
(Group Project)
Time
3 Months
Let's Cook Together!
Backstory
During the pandemic, people are using restaurant delivery services more and demand packaged goods. But cooking at home is increased a lot, too. Based on the survey from Hunter, 54 percent of respondents said they cook more than before the pandemic.
The Situation
We found solo cookers, especially graduate students are facing large portion and time controlling problems. We want to help students have an easy cooking environment and still connect with the community when they are remotely at home alone.
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The increased time of cooking makes users under pressure
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Lack of small portion recipes for solo cookers
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With problem to deal with the leftover food
Process
Problem Statement
Solo cookers struggle to cook efficiently & deal with leftover food under limited time and a large packages of food material
How Might we...
create an easy-to-use recipe for solo cookers to solve large portions of food problems and help them reduce waste and save time?
Research
Informal Interview (2)
Solo cooker does have problems when cooking alone
Interviewed two people to learn more about their most recent cooking experiences.
Some questions I asked:
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what is the problem when you cook alone?
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Please share your experience with reviewing recipes.
Formal Interview (5)
Solo cookers care about 4 points when cooking and using the recipe
After informal interviewing 2 participants, every team member interviewed one participant to realize more details. I went to the participant's home and observe how she used a recipe and how she cooked in the kitchen. Also, I checked the refrigerator which had some expired food.
Competitive Analysis Findings
No one focuses on solo cookers or small portion
meal requirements with the reduced waste concept
Our competitors (Mealtimem Kroger Opt Up, Food Network Kitchen, Plan to Eat and Fooducate had many features similar to the ones we planned to implement in our app. Yet, no app has all of the features we plan to implement consolidated into one application
Persona
The user persona was based on our user interviews. Most of our users are students and they live alone or with one roommate. We made a persona of a user who is in a master’s program in the USA. This helped us focus on the difficulties he faces when preparing a meal for himself. We used context elicited from the interview to make the persona more comprehensive, which allowed us to focus on a specific target audience when discussing features and solutions.
User Journey Map
Based on persona, I created a journey map to explore how users feel when they are at home but using an unsupportive application for cooking. From the result of the mood process, we figured out the opportunities we might have to help users experience a better meal preparation process.
Design
Goal
Ideation
My explorations centered around providing a contextual way of enjoying that is tailored to a user’s convenient way when cooking alone. These are solo cooker recipes and food exchanges. The grocery control may be a failure and would stop users to discover fun facts while cooking.
Wireframe Exploration
Initial Wireframes - All wireframes include a green border to simulate the edge of a phone screen along with a navigation bar to either move forward or backward between the user flows. Creating the initial wireframes required communication between all five members of our team. The styling behind many of the initial wireframes differed greatly from the first implementations and was altered to create a uniform and intuitive UI design. The initial UI design included the onboarding process, the recipe pages for viewing and using recipes along the search functions and filters.
User Testing
4 iterations with 17 users
Design Iteration
Iteration based on Users Feedback
Onboarding Page
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Added illustrations for preferences and the option to search for preferences and also provided the progress with color
Main Page & Search
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Added Video with play icon to make it easy to distinguish the material type
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Added the score for each recipe
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Added search camera to help users use the Ingredient recognition function to receive the related recipe
Recipe Page
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Added more pictures to make users follow the cooking status
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Removed the clicking step by step and replaced it with numbers steps that users could see at once
Final Outcome
Next Step
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More usability testing on the community feature
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Build chef content flows
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Flesh out the point-based system for meal sharing option
Our app is still a prototype so there are many areas for improvement and many more rounds of iteration that would benefit the design significantly. The rounds of testing that we have done gave us great insight into what is eye-catching, actually useful, and what caused confusion. It also gave us insight into the way our testing structure can affect the feedback we get.
We would also be developing a product handoff document so that developers would be able to take the research and design that we’ve done to get the front-end and back-end development started. This would include the prototype, user flow, design system, and copy.