Level 3 —Needfinding
Authors: Connie Du, Susmitha Kalidindi
Brainstorming
We are almost a third of the way done with our timeline and we have finally agreed on what we’re going to be working on.
During the first week, we discussed and explored a multitude of ideas. One of the first that seemed to garner favor was the refrigerator app — an app that kept track of what was in your fridge and suggested recipes based on that information. We set that aside to try and expand our arsenal.
Here are a few that we came up with:
- an alarm clock that yells at you
- event finder (lots of work)
- upgrade Piazza?
- comparing Uber/Lyft rates
- an app that reminds you to call loved ones
- family planning application
- an app that teaches you how to use popular application such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (to appeal to people that aren’t very tech-savvy)
Those are just a few of what we discussed. We wanted to have a variety of options to choose from. The items in bold became our next two main topics.
Narrowing it down
Group Planning Application
We all really liked the idea of a family/group planning app, but sadly this had been implemented many times in the past, and we felt that we couldn’t add much more to the existing pool of applications. This was the first to go.
Ride Comparison
We really wanted this idea to work out because it would have been extremely useful and we had a lot of nice features thought up (sorting by cheapest, adding public transportation (trains and buses), sorting by time, automatic surge pricing, extremely simple design/execution, etc etc) the list goes on and on. Ultimately, we decided that existing applications such as ride.guru and GoA2B were pretty much everything we were thinking about implementing. The only thing both of these applications were lacking was the inclusion of public transportation options. However we felt that tSo again, sadly, we had to scrap this idea.
Refrigerator App
After talking with Professor Boyle as well as brainstorming amongst ourselves, we shifted our take on this app to be more recipe-focused and Pandora-esque. Instead of focusing on the refrigerator aspect, we decided it would be more fun to have an intelligent system determine your favorite foods over time and suggest similar recipes you may like, expanding your palate and exposing you to new flavors and tastes.
The app can then take your planned recipes and create a grocery list for you as well as have a virtual refrigerator that could remind you of what’s in your kitchen at all times. We really liked this new take, so on Monday we decided to go with this (official name TBD).
At this point, while we didn’t have a name for the app, we already had some logos that we could use from our previous logo design process. We thought Connie’s cook-related logo was a good match for the app (shown below).
Interviewing
Before leaving class on Monday, we all came up with a bunch of questions together to ask people with different personas in our Interview Guide. Our goal for this app was to help people know their fridge and become better acquainted with the cooking process in an interactive way. Therefore, some of our personas included college students, parents with kids, constant grocery shoppers, and so on.
Next, after coming up with our target personas, we moved on to writing the general interview questions. Our plan was to understand each of our personas more by asking them questions about their kitchen lifestyle and designing our app according to the needs that seem most prevalent. Some example general questions include:
- How often do you cook? How many meals do you eat in a day?
- What problems do you face when you’re cooking?
- When you are out shopping, can you remember what you have in your fridge/pantry?
We wanted to make sure our questions were more open-ended to allow for our interviewees to share their own stories and to try to bring the interview to life.
We also devised some questions that would help us decide what kind of features to include in our app. For example, we came up with the question:
- “How often do your groceries go bad?”
since we were wondering if we should include an option in our app that lets you add the expiration date to very time-sensitive products such as milk, yogurt, cheese. Similarly, we came up with the question “Do you have any goals in your eating? Be healthier, lose weight?” to see what motivates people to cook. The answers from this question will help the app recommend to users what the best meal is based on their goal.
The next category of questions we thought of had to do with understanding our persona’s current methods of using technology to assist in their cooking and grocery shopping. These questions are listed below:
- How often do you look up recipes? What tools do you use to find them (Google, recipe books, family recipes)?
- Have you looked into cooking/recipe apps before? If so, which ones? Why or why not?
These first question would give us a sense of what users are currently turning towards to for help and what features they like from them. The second question would allow us to learn what competitor cooking/recipe apps are out there that our personas use, if there are any.
If our persona has never tried a cooking app before, we would request them to try Yummly, a large competitor recipe application, for a few days and report to us what features they thought were beneficial and which features they didn’t like and what features they would like to see.
We use this to observe our clients actively to get a more intimate and detailed sense of what a particular kind of user would look for in an app.
All this data will help us design our app and its features.
Getting a taste of the competition
We found various competitors for our cooking app, the most established ones included Supercook and Yummly.
Supercook
Supercook lent the idea of inputting the current ingredients from your fridge and basing recommendations off of that. However, Supercook’s interface didn’t appeal to us very much and we decided to make our app more interactive by adding elements such as a virtual fridge.
Yummly
Yummly is almost what we are hoping to achieve with our product. Among its features is a recommendation based on what you’ve cooked and liked in the past — a feature we thought would be very exciting in our own app. However, we hope to create an even friendlier, fun, and engaging design.
Right now, their website seems cluttered with the images touching. Plus, searching for a recipe can take a long time when looking through so many options. We would like to implement a feature where a user would answer a few questions about how they’re feeling so that we can recommend them a few tailored recipes so they don’t get a headache from trying to choose between many.
Now that the hardest part is over, we look forward to taking the next big step with our app — identifying potential customers, finding extremist users who can potentially push our app to showcase features that have yet to exist in the market, designing, designing, and… designing.
