Chef Curations: The Personal Chef Experience

Bringing you the “Personal Chef” in a Fresh Direct box.

Problem:
Our problem based on our research is that users need a way to draw inspiration for weekly meals, because the amount of information/recipe ideas existing on the internet is way too vast.

Our group saw the opportunity to deliver a “personal chef experience” t o the user. We redefined the idea of a “chef” to become more of a chef curated product experience that would also involve our user.

Audience:
My audience included middle-aged women with families, who had problems coming up with ideas of what to cook for dinner for their families. I did not know that many middle-aged women with families, as this was not my demographic. I found young new moms, as well as older established women who had grown children to learn more about their food preparation habits.

Constraints:

Time: About a week. My team was limited in the amount of physical interviews we could get due to time, but we were able to gather a lot of information through e-mail and phone interviewing.

Scope: Initially, I began searching for users of Fresh Direct and users of personal chefs. My group soon decided that we needed to broaden to scope of users to include all users of grocery delivery services. 
 
 Process:

My group began by storyboarding problems and solutions. I came up with the idea of changing the idea of “personal chef” to be personalized to be the user’s friend, but my group decided to focus more on providing the “personal chef” experience in a box. We wanted to create a more unique celebrity-chef curated Blue Apron experience for Fresh Direct.

After performing research by interviewing our users, we learned that we had to narrow down the scope of our research goals. We focused our goals on understanding user’s habits using general food delivery services and cooking processes. In addition, after we had narrowed our scope, we began to do further research to decide what type of information user’s prioritize when viewing a recipe card and what celebrity chefs they most notice.

most significant iteration we made was to simplify the “add to cart” feature by changing the color of the cart once the item was added. We also decreased the number of suggested selections to 2 items.

As next steps, we plan to first iterate our areas of focus: suggestions, recipe format, and actual content. For suggestions, we would like to see whether users liked having 2 or a certain number of suggested items. We also would like to see if people preferred a certain recipe format –website, on paper, or mobile. Finally, we would like to learn whether our users recognized or preferred certain chefs, cuisines, or dishes

Process: User Testing, User Research, Interviewing, Surveying, Persona Creation, UI, Empathy, Prototyping, Wireframing, Usability test

Takeaways:
 Research, repeat. Initially, we were unclear about our persona. However, we continued to research, interview, conduct contextual inquiries, and repeated these processes to hone down on the important information. By identifying our priorities of focus, we were able to discover our persona.

Broaden scope. My group went into the project with an idea that our user would be a Fresh Direct user. This led us to run into walls because we could not figure out how a user who got groceries delivered would ever need a personal chef. After broadening our scope to users of general grocery delivery services, we were able to see how the “personal chef” feature was able to fit into “Chef Curations”.

Below, find my group’s final screens and flow.