Coursera Interaction Design Capstone Project: Designing yumME
The design process for yumME really evolved over the course of this capstone project. I originally chose the design brief of glance which boiled down to — “find people and design a personal dashboard tailored to their needs.” I had the intent of taking this brief and building a dashboard around how an individual meal plans. When I started to explore the idea of what would work in a dashboard for meal planning I uncovered this concept also fit into the design brief of change. yumME had the potential to change how people meal plan.
During the early stages of interviews to find user needs some common themes emerged. People wanted inspiration and suggestions on meals tailored to their tastes. They wanted to be able to maximize and stretch the ingredients they purchased. They wanted a grocery list tied to the meals they had planned, and they wanted to be able to schedule meals. These core user needs became the foundation of features for yumME.
To bring these user needs to life I started creating storyboards to visualize some of the problems and scenarios users currently face around meal planning. This process helped me think about how yumME could provide a solution to them.
After a couple of storyboards were fleshed out I began work on paper prototypes. The paper prototyping phase of the design process was the most beneficial to the development of yumME. It allowed me to quickly explore some of the more ambitious and abstract concepts I had in mind.
Not only was the paper prototyping phase helpful for exploring design concepts, it was also a great way to conduct user testing and collect insightful feedback on the functionality of the prototype before it was too far in the design process. Through user testing at the paper prototype level it became clear that some key areas of the prototype needed to be reworked to improve the user experience. Getting that outside perspective was invaluable to the development process.
Taking the paper prototypes and creating high fidelity digital mockups provided an opportunity to get a real sense of flow to the design. I started to work through potential user journeys and address any issues I uncovered. When I began user testing with the digital prototypes more opportunities for improvements were uncovered. I got valuable feedback on how to improve the experience for setting up user’s tastes and adding ingredients to the grocery list.
By the end of design process yumME was able to address and provide solutions to the majority of the user needs discovered through interviews and fulfilled the design briefs around glance and change.
Highlights of yumME include:
· Interactive “Your tastes” section that allows users to select meals that look appealing for future suggestions
· “Discover meals” section that provides ideas for meals based off user tastes
· “Make a meal with what you have” section that allows users to speak or type ingredients they have to cook with and receive meal suggestions based off of them
· Meal schedule section with fully functional calendar that allows users to schedule and edit meals
· Interactive grocery list section with the ability to add and remove ingredients in real time
· Recipe details page with the ability to schedule the meal and add ingredients to the grocery list
