A Retrospective of UXDI Project 1: Spork

Hello! I am a student at General Assembly New York City in the User Experience Design course. I just simultaneously finished my first week of the program, my first project, and my first week in NYC. AND I’M ALIVE. In case you’re wondering, no I have not yet had time to have a celebratory drink or even a bite of ice cream but I will as soon as I tell you about my project. Buckle in and enjoy the process!

Target Market

After being given the category of ‘food’, the next step was to narrow down who the target market for this app would be. For my application to the UXDI program at General Assembly, I designed an app for grocery shopping which had that target market of health-conscious professionals with families. I decided that I would use the same target market and create an app which compliment that grocery app from before.

Interviews

I was able to interview one person from my target market in person but had to reach out to those I know from back home to do the rest of my interviews. The number one attribute of the interviews I noticed is how excited the participants became at the idea of finding an app that would save them time, money, but most importantly frustration and anxiety. The very idea of this existing almost visibly melted stress from their shoulders.

Synthesizing

As I synthesized the results of the interviews, it quickly became apparent that all of my candidates had very similar concerns and pain points. They all had certain foods that they were unable to eat and they all wanted to eat healthy but didn’t have much time to devote to figuring out how to do so. Another issue that many of the candidates brought up was boredom. Even if they were able to find a healthy plan, they often stuck with the same exact meals every week which promptly got old. One user pointed out that kids ‘love repetition’ but adults get bored quickly. This was an interesting caveat to consider when imagining a potential app.

Sketching

When sketching up the app design, my main concerns were that the app was simple but not at the cost of leaving out an important feature. I also thought it was important to have the right rhetoric to draw the user into the story and culture of the app. The biggest concern was meal plans that fit the family restrictions so the app begins with questions about the user’s diet, allergies, and religion. The next thing it asks of the user is to choose one source of protein for each day of the week. In this way, the user will have the same protein every Monday but the app will provide up to 3 different choices of recipes built around that protein.

Next, there is a walk through that shows what the main buttons do. The Meal Plan button shows a month view of meals. The user can pick a single week or date to see a view of what’s on the menu. They can then choose to see the recipe itself for each meal. When on the recipe, they can hit the heart button to favorite the recipe and therefore add it to their ‘favorites’ list. They can choose to share their menu and recipe or to export it. They are allowed to share with their social media, via text or email, or to another Spork user. When exporting, they can either email, print, or send to their Grocery Store App.

Under their profile, they can change who is in their family, link family members to Spork accounts, see their aggregated grocery list, change their diet preferences, or go to their favorite recipes. They can also go to their ‘Explore Your Inspiraiton’ page which has a Pinterest style board of beautiful food pictures linked to different recipes. They would be formed based on other users. Here the user can hit the heart to add to their favorites list, hit the plus button to add the recipe to a specific menu, or hit the share button to share in the various ways discussed previous.

Prototyping

When prototyping the sketch, there were certain changes that had to be made just to make the information architecture sturdy. For instance, the original ‘Meal Plan’ view was per week but in the prototype, this would not have shown the full capacity of what the app can show. There were many share and export buttons added throughout the app during prototyping. And, the favorites list and grocery list were added to the Profile button in prototyping upon realizing there was nowhere to actually find the information being aggregated. It often takes physically creating something and using it in order to realize you have left something literally in your head.

User Testing

During user testing, I found that users often tried to push words instead of icons so I extend the amount of room touchable in the prototype. Users also thought that ‘preferences’ meant changing a password or inserting how much money they’d like to spend. I changed ‘preferences’ to ‘dietary preferences’ which was more understandable to the user. Finally, user feedback said that there should be a feature offering the ability to see calorie intake and a sort of ‘snapshot’ of their health for each day, month, and year. I added this feature to the Meal Plan tab.

Presentation

In preparation for my presentation, I practiced how I would bring the room into the story of the app. Knowing that there would be 15+ presentations in a row, I wanted to draw the room in with more than features. From my presentation feedback, I can see that I did succeed in grabbing attention but need to improve on actually walking through the app itself. Looking back, I think I psyched myself out because of the time limit. I wasn’t sure how I would walk someone through the app in such a short amount of time. In the future, I will script this walk through out a bit more and more than likely do it in real time.

Spork is a prototype created in POP. Feel free to explore

Reflections

If I were to continue work on this app, I would love to change a few of the small details such as adding a home button. It seemed as if the users always were wanting to go back to a central location when they weren’t sure what to do next. I liken this to when you’re lost in a foreign city and you automatically try to make it back to the center of town. I would like to add a home space where a user can get back to and start again.

I would also like to build out the idea of the health snapshot feature and possibly link it with a health tracking app in the same way the Spork would be linked to the grocery store app.

More than anything, I can see through my research for this app and the grocery store app that these sort of applications are truly needed in the target market of health-conscious professionals with families. The first company to create apps like these and create them well will find themselves quite successful.