Every day, there is that awkward dance around the question: ‘What’s for Dinner’
..so I designed a fix for it
Like millions of families around the world, I’d like to eat simple, healthy-ish and diverse food and I wish it wasn’t such a pain-in-the-butt to plan and administrate it. I’m not the first person to address this issue, and yet none of the apps and services I’ve seen out there have solved it for me just yet. I got to approach the issue from a wonderfully academic UX perspective, as part of my mid-thirties foray into learning-stuff-while-travelling. (I am spending some months country-hopping with my boyfriend who is a remote dev, and using the time to up my game.)
As someone who has been designing business functionality for yonks on the back of a 90’s education in information systems, tons of awesome features flooded into my mind right at the start. I pushed them aside and started interviewing people and drawing story boards to crystallise the focus of this design. Being a poignant subject for most, more ideas emerged — there were so many directions one could take this such as a budgeting tool, a kitchen stock manager or a regular automated refresh of staples.
The design that emerged focused on answering the question ‘What’s for Dinner’ in the simplest way possible. I decided on a flow with four steps: gather user preferences the first time they use the app, then suggest weekly meal plans, provide the shopping list and show the recipes to cook from.
Here are some of the screens and how they progressed from paper prototypes (which I did under duress since I’ve mostly forgotten how to use a pen), through heuristic evaluation and user testing. Disclaimer: a graphic design course is next on my to-do list.
The page that confounded people the most was the meal plan, and I believe it’s because I designed it mobile first and then got a little lazy. Here are the original and revised designs:
Although the revised page is busier, people immediately understood that they were looking at their meals for the week when they saw 7 meals in a row. It was also quicker and far more intuitive to view and edit selections on a single page.
One of the most joyful moments in the design process was using UserTesting.com (no, they are not paying me to say this) to see real users using my prototype. These complete strangers with diverse backgrounds, sitting in their own homes and clicking through my prototype gave me fantastic insight into how people perceived my design and their thought processes when choosing recipes to cook. I can also see it being real-world invaluable to hear the opinions of people in different countries. American testers were confounded at my use of ‘tin of tomato paste’ in a recipe. Amusingly, there was one tester who sounded like Darth Vader (thanks to terrible recording quality) and I will never know what he was saying..
(ps. I trust that AllRecipes.com will not mind the purely academic use of their recipes for this exercise. Participants got pretty excited about some of them and I’m definitely going to try out that black bean veggie burger..)
