It is a challenge to design a mobile recipe book for people who has tight schedules every day.
The reason to develop this tool is to help target users relieve their burden on daily cooking.
With a fast-paced lifestyle, young professionals barely have time to follow the traditional routine of cooking their meals from scratch. Savr aims to help this group of people who are still interested in cooking for themselves but are short on time every day.
On Day 1, I mapped out the user's experience from selecting a recipe to finishing cooking. From the map, it is clear to see the entire experience could be split into two portions, preparation for cooking and cooking by steps.
The second day was full of brainstorming. I started to do quick divergent thinking with sketches. Within 2 hours of concentrating on solutions, I come up with eight ideas, which are candidates to be selected as the final solution.
I ended up selecting one of the solutions to dive deeper with more steps. It is a solution including all elements I expected to solve pain points regarding time-saving and effortless cooking, whilst organizing information in a proper way.
Day 3 is to develop the selected solution into a sketched storyboard as a blueprint of the final design. Starting with a weekly meal plan and ending up with sharing dishes with the community, I focused on only one route to optimize the cooking experience from start to end.
Day four is a challenging day to crank out a prototype which only focuses on the solution to achieve the goal of this sprint. It is a day to maximize production within a limited amount of time. In the prototype, I created a series of checklists, step by step, for the meal preparation, as well as a multi-tasking option for users to choose from during inevitable waiting time. These are two additions to the existing recipe app as my designed solutions to save users' time and efforts on their daily cooking, whilst ensuring the quality of their dishes!
Because the design is based on an existing recipe app, I conducted five usability tests to verify if my solutions improve the current user experience.
With five test participants I recruited, I first asked their impression on existing approaches to learning how to cook based on their tight daily schedules and heavy workload. Then I guided them to stick with one recipe in the prototype, follow instructions step by step, and describe their experience and feelings throughout the process.
RESULTS:
All five participants gave positive feedback on the solutions in terms of time and efforts saving, which means the improvements are on the right track. However, there are still some details to improve:
- Two of them got confused when the "meanwhile" window popped up without any on-boarding or introductions;
- The "time left" count-down reminder could be visualized into a progress bar;
- Some of them request more information, such as calories and allergy alert, to show on the meal selecting page;
- Voice assistance could be a plus to reduce touching on the screen with messy hands;
- Users need "rewards" and compliments as motivations for cooking, not kidding.
Pick up users' comments from the usability test.
Develope more route to enhance users' engagement, such as community and milestone reward.
Come up with more hand free solutions.