Design Retrospective: Rapid Prototyping
Researching and designing a mobile app that solves a food-related problem.
Project Brief:
Prompt: Solve the problems of real users in the general category of food.
This two-day project involved:
- 6 User Interviews
- Affinity Mapping
- Creating a Problem Statement and User Persona
- Sketching Wireframes and Building a Clickable Prototype
- 4 Usability Tests
Step 1: Narrowing the Scope
After conducting interviews with six different people, it became clear that food plays different roles in their lives. Seemingly simple activities like going to a grocery store or planning a meal varied significantly in meaning across the tested users. After deciding to focus on the grocery store experience, I pushed people to evaluate what their friction points are. Unsurprisingly, everyone mentioned long checkout lines and difficulty in finding some items quickly. While participants did not directly mention food waste as a pain point that affected their in-store experience, their words revealed that the fear of producing food waste indirectly shaped their in-store behaviors and habits:
On shopping only once a week: “I won’t go grocery shopping until I use up everything I have.”
On planning their grocery list: “I’ll plan my grocery list based on what leftovers I have.”
On why they discontinued cooking regularly: “Anytime I bought something I didn’t already know how to cook, it went to waste.”
Step 2: Identifying a Problem
While the previous quotes initially seemed disconnected, the affinity mapping process brought them together into an undeniable pattern. Regardless of whether people meal-planned or impulse shopped, everyone alluded to having a strong aversion to wasting food. Ultimately, throwing away food felt both wasteful and avoidable. When you threw away food, you were throwing away money, which contradicted the reason why a lot of people went grocery shopping in the first place — to save money! Thus, I choose to focus on this frustrating dilemma of food waste while trying to conserve both food and financial resources.
Step 3: Defining the Problem and Its Context
Problem Statement: Many people routinely grocery shop to in order to save money and live a healthier lifestyle. Grocery Shoppers end up not using or throwing out some of the food they buy at the store. How might we design a mobile application that helps them accurately plan the right amount of food to buy in order to eliminate wasting food and money?
My idea is to create an app that helped users determine what quantities of food to by. This is accomplished by scaling the amount of ingredients in popular recipes in order to tell app users exactly how much to buy, given how many servings they specifically wish to make.
Step 4: Creating a Persona
After defining the problem, I created an ideal end user for my app by combining aspects of all six interviewees.This exercise helped me to have a very real person in mind when selecting certain features and designing the user flow of my app.
Step 5: Building a Clickable Prototype in Marvel
I converted my lo-fi sketches into a clickable prototype and tested its utility and usability with four participants. Each was given two tasks:
- Browse for a chicken noodle recipe, scale the ingredients, and add them to your grocery list.
2. Search for a chicken noodle recipe, and save the recipe for the next time you go grocery shopping.
Step 6: Usability Tests
While all participants indicated they had the necessary features to complete each of the two tasks, pauses and timing of questions helped me identify where and when confusion occurred. Often, asking participants what they expected to see or experience helped come up with ideas for possible solutions.
Step 7: Next Steps
The next step is to create another lo-fi iteration of a clickable prototype with clearer action button wording and a few more relevant features. For example, one participant frequently accessed recipe websites and mentioned that she would never use a recipe without reading user reviews. Adding these design features would really help bring this app to life! Following another round of usability tests, I would follow up with hi-fi prototypes in Sketch.
Thank you for reading! I hope you’ve enjoyed!
