Impro Chef App
Design Theme
My observation centered around time, it also merges slightly into Change. I want to learn about how time affects and influences people’s food preparation and consumption behaviours on a weekly basis. I asked 3 participants to walk me through their daily routine starting from how they get their grocery, how much time they would like to invest on their three meals and reasons why, as well as investigating key factors that influence their dine in and dine out experience.
User’s Need Finding
After conducting in-person interview and observation research. I found a few key insights for these 3 types of users.
• The user needs to make her meals nutritious and healthy in a short time (as low as 5 mins)
• The user needs a way to gather all of the required ingredients as quickly as possible because this takes her the longest time in the cooking process.
• The user needs a way to make up the dishes because she always doesn’t have enough ingredients to make up certain recipes.
• The user needs to make the dinner experience interesting because she is always running out of ideas what to cook.
• The user needs a way to know how to make a healthy and delicious meal even only with whatever it’s available at the fridge.
• The user needs a way to make different types of dishes quickly because he/she gets off pretty late sometimes and was fatigue to cook.
Ideation (Design Decision)
Imagine you just arrived home from work; you want to make a dinner quickly. Meanwhile, you are not sure about what to cook or you don’t know where to start or you are missing some ingredients you will need. With good guidance, cooking is not a time consuming and boring task.
Two ideas are explored.
1. Impro Chef App [Final App for development]
Impro Chef App is a food recipe app that provides the users with the best food recipes based on their criteria.
(Reasons to be chosen: I am an active user for any good recipes apps. There’s many recipes out there, but most of the time, any ingredients they suggested don’t match with what I have at home. I always need to improvise because of missing ingredients. This app provides the recipe options based on the availability of food items from the fridge, so it removes the friction on the food substitution part.)
2. Speedy Chef App
Speedy Chef App is a food delivery app that delivers food from local stories in just a min.
Final POV (Value Proposition)
Imagine you just arrived home from work; you want to make a dinner quickly. Meanwhile, you are not sure about what to cook or you don’t know where to start or you are missing some ingredients you will need. With good guidance, cooking is not a time consuming and boring task.
Impro Chef provides the users with the best food recipes based on difficulties, types of cuisines, the amount of time required and the availability of the food items at the fridge. One can have the best meal depending on their occasions in just a few minutes.
Iterations
Paper Prototype
Design Heuristic Evaluation
Initial Prototype
Final Prototype
Testing your prototype
I have conducted two types of testing to see if most users can understand and find the app easy to use, including both In-Person and Online Testing.
- In-Person Prototype Testing:
2. A/B Version Online User Testing
4 Tasks for the users to complete:
1. You are testing out this new ImproChef App. Imagine your cooking skill is at the intermediate level, and you would like to make a Chinese Seafood Noodle dinner within 25 mins of time frame based on the food ingredients you have from your fridge. What would you do?
2. You love this recipe and you would like to add it to the favorite recipe list so that you can make it again later on. What would you do?
3. How do you get to the “Shopping List Page”? What does it mean to you? When you arrive there, what will you do if you want to delete “6 oz Chicken Breast”?
4. Imagining you finish reviewing your shopping list, you want to synchronize all the food items you have from your shopping list to your current fridge so you won’t buy duplicate items. What would you do?
In Person Testing & Online Testing Results:
Overall all 4 users tended to find the app “very easy” to use and. Information is straight forwarded and clear. They all found the two apps were equally appealing and didn’t find there’s much difference between the two apps.
One user especially likes the app that provides the function to “Sync” all items with the current fridge, as it’s a unique feature. One suggested having a search function for different types of food like “dinner” or “lunch” or “breakfast”.
A/B Final Testing Conclusion: Regarding version 1 (without words) and version 2 (with caption under the footer menu). Version 2 is the winner because it explicitly expressed what the icon means by listing the words below. It doesn’t cause cognitive memory load for the users to interpret what those links are. Words and icons combined worked the best as a combination.
