This is a story about a GV style design sprint. If you’ve never heard of that, you can learn more here or read the book.
Meet Team CookIn
Hi there. We’re the masterminds behind the awfully genius idea of a personalized, in-home chef service app called CookIn. We came together in the crucible of sitting near eachother in a classroom when the professor told us to pick teammates. Team roles were filled out before our first meeting, but they quickly devolved. While some individual actions such as scheduling team meetings and booking rooms, or creating an agenda, can be assigned, most of the heavy duty work really needs to be done together. All of us contributed ideas, visuals, and text to the project, so our roles were very fluid. We’ll discuss more about that later in the article, but we found intersubjective workflow far more important than ensuring we followed rigid team roles.
Awfully Genius Ideas are Born in Constraint
We had been given our assignment early in 2018 and scheduled our first meeting the week after. It did not go so well. After everyone had showed up and we had gotten past introductions and side conversations, we hit a massive road block. Our skill sets were diverse, but we had no experience in product design or programming. Ideas dribbled out like water from a leaky faucet, but they all went down the drain. Nothing was sticking until we imposed a time limit.
After almost an hour, time was running out, and so was our allotted time in the room we had booked. Then someone (it was James, thanks James) said a few magical words that perked everyone up:
“What about an uber service for cooks?”
“What, like they deliver food to you? Doesn’t that already exist?”
“No, you order a chef to drive to your house and cook FOR you.”
That last sentence is what sold it. Who WOULDN’T want someone to show up and cook a meal for them in the comfort of their own home? As I’m sure you can tell, this sparkle in our collective eye had not yet been tempered by the reality of having to 1) pay for said food and service, and 2) consider that customers may not want strangers in their residence. It was a great start, though, and the passion was flowing. What-if’s abounded, and we vowed to figure out all the hard questions at some point. At the very least, our goal was to have an actual CookIn before the semester was over.
Apps Are Made with Paper and Marvel
Immediately after we decided on a concept, we moved to design. Conversations about what CookIn should be focused very heavily on the user experience, and initial reactions from strangers did too. Initial design began on paper which proved to be extremely useful because we could erase, scrap, and edit anything on the fly. Having the flexibility of paper helped us quickly mock up interface pages. At the beginning we drew up anything and everything that came to mind, and waned our choices to what everyone on the team liked. Paper and pencil is still a powerful tool, and anyone can use it. Near the end of our next meeting we decided on these designs.
Now that we had our draft prototype, we moved to interaction. We redrew the designs with cleaner lines and began labeling them A-Z. We mapped out how the user would navigate and move through the pages of the app. This proved to be extremely helpful, and we redesigned many of the pages to make navigation easier for users. Once we were confident we nailed that we moved on to actual prototyping.
Let me get this out of the way: go to marvelapp.com if you want to mock up designs for an app. It’s an amazing site that allows multiple people to work on projects, has a ridiculous amount of assets built in, and a robust editing system that honestly you should have to pay for. It’s all free.
We found Marvel pretty quickly using our google fu, and immediately opened a new project and got everyone on board. It took a little under an hour for us to turn our drawings into professional looking app pages, and they even allow you to see what they’d look like on a phone. Once again, using another tool to mock up interfaces allowed us another round of redesigns. We loved the minimalist, clean look that we ended up with.
You Thought We Couldn’t Do It, Didn’t You?
Not sure if anyone will believe us, but we had a real CookIn!
Okay, it wasn’t an official CookIn, but it was close enough. We had an acquaintance of ours that was a self-professed “amazing chef” (his words, not ours) go through the process of being selected by a user, purchase their own ingredients, and show up at a specific time and cook! To be fair, the location was one of our team members residences, but we had fresh eyes and taste buds for the experience itself. The result was happiness all around.
Our chef, Anthony, showed up with a cooler full of ingredients and some wooden utensils to help out with the cooking. Other than that, all the tools he used came from the customer’s kitchen. The customer ordered 8 dishes total, 4 appetizer plates and 4 main course plates.
The appetizer was arancini, fried rice balls with a delicious outer layer of cheese and herbs served with a tomato sauce. Tell me that doesn’t look delicious.
Next up was bucatini carbonara, an Italian pasta dish traditionally made with fresh vegetables and cheeese.
Our CookIn turned out to be a complete success. Awkward moments were a large worry, but our chef was usually busy cooking so pauses in conversation were no big deal. Everyone got along, the food was out of this world good (say the customers), and a wonderful experience was had all around. I must reiterate because the customers wouldn’t let me forget: the food was incredible.
Even better than that were the reactions to the overall experience. Each customer was walked through the entire ordering process and utilized our prototype from sign up to check out. Our user design did not go unnoticed, and ease of use was a compliment that we were very grateful to receive. It was a massive relief to know a CookIn could go off without a hitch and we got the answer we wanted: CookIns are AWESOME!
The Interviews Are In, and People Are Hungry
After hosting our CookIn we conducted closing interviews with all parties. Feedback is a mechanism that is essential to a quality-based service app, so this initial feedback was extremely important to understanding how to move forward. We built a script with questions for both the chef and the customers. Every party rated their experience as fantastic and expressed interest in attending CookIns in the future. The customers in particular loved that they could see how their food was made, and what ingredients were used. One customer commented that they felt confident they were getting quality food because they could directly interact with the person making it. We learned that onboarding chefs may require far more work than an app like Lyft, where you simply sign up and attend a short meeting. Customers were adamant that safety and background checks were key to inviting someone into their home, and having that person vetted and tested before they were allowed to begin work would be a necessity. Another area customers wanted addressed was setting expectations before the chef arrives. Ensuring that allergies, dress, and attitude were shared beforehand (for example: no peanut butter, business casual, quiet conversation preferred).
On the chef side, they too wanted more information before arriving so they could further prepare to give the highest quality experience possible. The chef commented that what tools were available at the residence was information that the customer should provide. They were also was interested in travel compensation, because driving to both gather the ingredients and commuting to the house of the customer is costly. Another key area was safety, the chef wanted a feature to opt out of a CookIn if they deemed the situation unsafe. Finally, the chef was eager to know if there was flexibility in the pricing of dishes and what the payment structure would look like after a fee was taken.
Overall, we’re very pleased with our exit interviews. Many of the questions and concerns had to do with the business and not the prototype. The customers and chefs both raved about the minimalist, easy to navigate page system. They enjoyed the idea of scrolling through chef profiles and finding someone perfect for an in-home dining experience. One of the best suggestions we received was expanding our ecosystem to three apps: the regular CookIn app, a separate chef app, and an app specifically tailored to catering. The Sprint turned out to be a fantastic way to receive valuable feedback on a robustly built prototype.
No Running in the Kitchen
Sprinting as an archetype works pretty well, but certain constraints can push a team towards obstacles. We loved a lot of the solutions given to us: making a map, prototyping suggestions, and talking to experts in the field. Some parts, we feel, however, are a bit too constrained. One of the largest changes we made was to turn group roles into group archetypes. Individuals may focus on certain areas, but the way we developed a workflow together proved far more useful. That may not work for every group, we had established leadership that could push through ruts and blocks when they came up, but we found working together to be far more effective than working separately.
Another aspect of working together as a team largely required ripping up the “week” of the Sprint and combining certain parts of different days. Turns out a lot of the great ideas we had spent time distilling down are actually pretty bad once you get to the prototyping phase, which means you have to go back to Tuesday and remix things until you get it right. Even when you’re sprinting, you need to take the time to ask great questions or learn how to identify what conversations need to happen at the right time in between all the large, fleshed out parts of the process.
Different Cuisines, Different Futures
While we loved working on prototyping CookIn, our skillsets are a bit too similar to successfully Sprint all the way to the finish line again. We learned so much about design, outreach, user experience, and what sort of challenges entrepreneurs face every day. Not only are we thankful, we’re energized to move forward on our own paths and work on our own projects. Thanks for reading and sharing our journey, and be careful about inviting strangers into your home to cook food (unless they’re there to CookIn).
Bon appetit,
-Carlos, James, Jake, and Blaine
