General Assembly. Project 1. Design a mobile app

Sara Michelazzo

Published in

Student life at General Assembly UXDi

4 min readFeb 15, 2015

TOPICS: Needfinding, Scenarios, Rapid Prototyping (POP)

PROJECT BRIEF

Quiz James about his interests and find a problem that could be solved with a simple mobile app. Design an app that solves the problem simply and effectively.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

James wishes he were a better cook. He enjoys cooking, but doesn’t have much time for it. He looks for recipes online and makes up his own, but usually cooks the same 5 basic recipes. When he cooks, he tends to modify recipes on the fly without keeping track of the changes. This makes it difficult to reproduce the same recipes in the future.

SOLUTION

I designed an app to make James a better cook. It helps him keep track of successful recipe alterations and build his own recipe collection. The app also gives James inspiration to continue cooking his favourite recipes and to add more variety to his repertoire.

NEEDFINDING

The first step of the project involved focusing on the problems. Needfinding included getting ready for the interview, conducting the interview, audio recording the interview and taking notes. Then going through all of the materials again.

KEY FINDINGS

James enjoys cooking; he used to cook every day before he got married 9 months ago. Now he cooks 2/3 times a month and sometimes during the weekend with his wife. James tends to prepare basic meals, usually with the same 5 recipes. Sometimes he looks for recipes online and he makes his choice based on the pictures and the ingredients.

He usually changes recipes to suit his taste but he doesn’t keep track of the changes he makes. The result is that he often gets frustrated because the recipes don’t always taste the same every time.

KEY QUOTES

“I look for recipes online and I make my choice based on the pictures and the ingredients.”

“During the downtimes while cooking I read the news on my iPhone.”

“I am willing to learn because I really enjoy the process.”

GOALS

Help James to remember successful changes to recipes.Collect his recipes.

BRAINSTORMING

I have sketched new ideas on paper to keep track of them but I didn’t read them back until I had finished analysing the problem and the user’s needs. Usually, new ideas become a great source of innovation later on in the process.

USER FLOW

In order to define the main flow I sketched the whole process, underlining the decision points and the interaction with external resources.

JAMES IN THE KITCHEN

James wants to cook a recipe he made a few months ago. He can’t remember the ingredients and he looks them up on the app. He decides to modify the recipe on the fly and the result is awesome: it tastes much better this way.

Key findings:

Usually people who are cooking have dirty hands. This is why:

the main information should fit on one page, so there is no need to scroll.
the iPhone shouldn’t turn the screen off while on the recipe page.

James likes to alter recipes but usually the changes are small. This is why I should:

insert a clone button so James doesn’t have to fill the new recipe form from scratch and he can save time.

JAMES LOOKS FOR RECIPES ONLINE

James prefers to look for new recipes online using his desktop because he finds the bigger screen more convenient. This is why he needs a tool that synchronizes his desktop with his phone.

SKETCHES

I drew some rough sketches of the main pages and then I showed them to James. The goal was to understand which pages I could improve based on James’ feedback.