Designing a home-cooked food ordering Mobile App
A UX-UI case study
Cook4 App is a home-cooked food delivery app which connects Cook and Gourmet. Cook4 helps users to order home-cooked food made by genuine cooks (chefs) who are located in your vicinity.
How the APP works
The customer downloads the app, filters through a list of cooks specific to the customer’s location. The customer orders the food sharing his address, email id, name, etc. Along with the request, the customer sends a copy of the identity document and statement of a bank account. The cook who can also be the delivery person( a service for which he will be paid by the customer) remains in constant touch with the customer to ensure everything is executed in a procedural manner until the food is delivered.
Understand the Challenges
Dining out or ordering in? This question is almost a daily dilemma in everyone’s life, or at least 3–4 times a week. Although in our day and age, multiple options are available, ranging from restaurant chains and multicuisine diners, but the food tastes synthetic and has a peculiar taste and flavour. Only because each restaurant is offering essentially the same thing & the consumers end up paying each time heavily. The essential value of authentic cuisine lies in the fresh preparation by a dedicated chef which can’t be achieved in a hectic, fast-paced, profit-oriented restaurant environment.
The Goal
- Unifying app approach for Cook and Gourmet.
- Allow the user to add items to a shopping list conveniently.
- Integrated maps, for an easy location-based search of nearby Cooks.
- Multiple menus segregated by type of Cuisine, snacks, desserts, night service & healthy food options.
- Check customer reviews & Cooks ratings before ordering.
- Get an estimated time for delivery updates.
- Chefs earn money & build a business by simply cooking at own home.
- Chefs get payments directly deposited in their bank accounts.
Process
I did competitive research and identified that there is no other product that is providing on-demand food delivery in this home-cooked food category. However, there were some food delivery apps in the market serving restaurants.
Empathy
Further, to build empathy with users, I started with a set of casual Interviews with stakeholders and in-house colleagues. This resulted in a preliminary set of requirements and creating user Persona specific Goals and Frustrations.
User Stories and MVP
User research and persona creation brought up the users primary needs, goals, and behaviours. So the requirements that needed to be implemented:
- Easy food search and order
- Feedback and Reviews for the service and items.
- Easy payment setup
- Location-based sorting.
- Profile that contains a history of feedback and orders.
User Flow
I’ve built a user flow diagram to map every action of the user interaction required to accomplish the primary goal of this app.
Wireframes
Wireframes are designed first to create the entire user flow ensuring that all the features are executed without omission & user journey is completed with least number of steps. I designed wireframes showing information architecture of the eventual App layout.
VISUAL DESIGN
With a few iterations, I designed the final UI screens with Sketch. Made some mood boards and conducted A/B testing during the process to define the elements, colours and patterns.
My goal was to make a clean minimal and modern look that helps the user to order food with zero effort. Cook4 is a food-based app; that’s why I focused on the colours scheme similar to vegetables to invoke feelings of satiety & nutrition.
I also designed the illustration of the logo to keep the look sweet and modern.
What have I learned from this project?
More research leads to better user insights resulting in great output. I tried to design this product with the help of interviewing stakeholder and colleague. I prefer we had interviews with some real users, but stakeholder didn’t allow us, so we conducted in-house interviews with colleagues.
Check out the Marvel prototype of the app.
Credit: EL Group International
