The Lost Chef Case Study: Crafting a Diverse and User-Centric Culinary Experience (Part 3)
Content Requirements and UX Research Methods
Content Requirements:
1. Maintenance Considerations-
i. Today’s Specials: This page’s content will be refreshed every 20
minutes showing the most popular recipes for that day
ii. Chef’s Picks: Most Popular Chef’s favorites will be updated on this
page every week
iii. Short Video Clips: The users can view recipes being made in short
clips that can be posted by all users
iv. Categories and Filters: The Categories and Filters use tags to
segregate the recipes to optimize it’s searchability
2. Audience-
i. Short Video Clips: It is easy for the users to follow through without
having to watch long videos like on YouTube
ii. Categories and Filters: Categories and Filters help people across all
demographics and with all kinds of food preferences to be able to
access recipes to their customized liking
3. Technical Considerations-
i. Email subscription: Subscribing to the email newsletters will keep
the user notified about the activities by their favorite chef, give them
a way to contact support for help, etc.
UX Research Methods:
- Accessibility evaluation
a. Importance
i. Accessibility testing is the practice of making your app
usable to as many people as possible
ii. Helps to make our application accessible to people with
various disabilities like hearing disabilities, vision
impairment etc.,
iii. Implementing accessibility in your app shows you’re
willing to go the extra mile for every user which in turn
also broadens your market
b. Methodologies
To improve the accessibility of our application, we are
implementing certain features as follows:
i. Voice Over — Voice over is a screen reading tool which is
common in all the applications but in addition to this, we are
providing a feature were the voice over will be able to
describe the entire image
ii. Dynamic Text — This is an important feature for
accessibility, allowing users with partial vision impairments
to increase the font size for readability
iii. Invert Colors — This feature is useful for people with light
sensitivities, poor vision and in some cases, color blindness
c. Implementation in Project
i. Voice over over an entire requested recipe is implemented
in our project (the lost chef) by helping the blind person to
check on the required food recipe.
ii. Dynamic text are used in our project to help the people
with partial vision impairments to resize the text size
according to their needs to increase visibility.
iii. Invert color feature is included in our project to help the
color blindness people by changing the light to dark and
contrast colours for better visualization
d. Needs and Benefits
i. Voice Over, Dynamic Text and Invert color features benefits
the diabled people to utilize the application in a better way
ii. Implementing these features increases the user base to a
wider range which corresponds the application to be a
headstart to our competitors and a massive success
iii. Accessibility evaluation enhances automation
iv. It helps the users to navigate, perceive and interact with
the application on a better crisis
2. Qualitative Usability Testing
a. Usability
i. Usability testing focuses on identifying and solving specific
usability problems and determining whether the product
works correctly. You watch users complete tasks using your
product or service
Purpose:
- How users perform using the interface
- Understand why something isn’t working
- Can they complete it
- How do they complete it
- Is something discoverable/findable
Goal:
- Evaluate the product or service
- Improve the functionality
- Validate the solution against user expectations
b. Qualitative vs Quantitative
c. Implementation
i. Define the problem: Figure out what you’re testing and why
ii. Recruit Participants: Who are going to be your participants
iii. Write your tasks: Show me how you would do task XYZ
o Are they able to perform the task
o How do they perform it
o What problems do they have
o Do they complete the task
iv. Analysis: Analysis data collected from all users
o How many people completed the task
o What problems do they have
o What parts did they struggle with
o What did you want to learn in the first place, did your
results answer those questions
d. Major Flows
User:
i. Login / create account
ii. Find, filter, and view existing recipes
iii. Give feedback to chiefs for their dishes (comments, likes)
iv. Share a recipe on social media
v. Bookmark a recipe and add it to cookbook
vi. Follow /unfollowing chefs
vii. View history of liked recipes
Chef:
i. Login / create account
ii. Post a new recipe
iii. Get feedback from users from comments, likes
iv. Find an existing recipe and update or delete content
v. Find, filter, and view existing recipes
vi. Bookmark a recipe and add it to cookbook
vii. View history of liked recipes
e. Tasks
User:
i. Create a new account and login using social sign-in (google)
ii. Login using the created account and enable “login using
biometric”
iii. Post a new baking recipe with the following filters
o Serving 2 people
o Difficulty easy level
o Tags dessert, Italian, Halloween
iv. Find and update the above recipe and upload a video for
the same
v. Find a Christmas snack and add it to your cookbook
Chef:
i. Create a new account and login using social sign-in (google)
ii. Login using the created account and enable “login using
biometric”
iii. Find a chocolate cake with a difficulty level of easy and
share it with someone
iv. Find a pumpkin based beverage and add it to your
cookbook
v. Create a low carb diet recipe and share it on social media
f. Findings
g. Issue Prioritization
3. Diary Study
a. Methodology
Diary Study has 5 steps in its process :
i. Planning and Preparation — Defining what is timeline, the
scope of this study, what we need to understand by the end of
it.
ii. Prestudy Brief — Inform your participants and discuss the
study with them, walk them through
iii. Logging Period — Be specific, provide a simple yet clear
framework giving detailed instructions to the participants
about the logging
iv. Post Study Interview — Follow up interviews to uncover
information the participants may not have logged in the
diary, ask questions, and ask feedback
v. Analyze Findings — Analyze the data you gained from this
process
b. Importance, Needs and Benefits
i. Importance
o Can help you learn more about how users
act/think/feel in real-world situations
o Keeping logs of users interacting with a product gives
valuable insight of contextual information which is
qualitative in nature
o It can help you understand user habits, user journey,
their attitudes and feelings and the context of use of
your product
ii. Need & Benefits
o Participants’ Autonomy is kept as this method is less
intrusive
o Understand behavior over time and collect
information in real time
o Can be conducted with many participants at the
same time
o Collect information in a natural environment and
more likely
o to identify the external forces
c. Implementation and Why we use it
i. Our Project caters to the need of a wide user base, using a
Diary Study technique we can understand what leads a user to
make decisions when interacting with our application.
ii. Because we have a wide user base, by conducting a Diary
Study, it will help us understand the various experiences and
learn behaviors & perceptions changes
iii. Conducting a Diary Study with a prototype version of the
application will give us real time information on the user’s
feelings, thoughts, and behavioral patterns to understand
how to better what they need
iv. Conducting a Diary Study will answer our questions of
what triggers users to make certain decisions, what time they
are most prone to use the product and what was the reason
behind it.
d. Findings
i. Diary entries revealed that users overwhelmingly failed to
find very specific recipes of their choice on other websites
and blogs. With its filter features, tags, and Keywords-
searching on The Lost Chef was easier to do and gave them
various results. It answered questions of: “Were you able to find
recipes you needed? /Liked?”
ii. “Were you able to follow the recipes with ease and comfort?”
To this, the Diary Entries mentioned that the Prototype had a
video feature alongside the steps of the recipe that helped
them achieve that side by side.
iii. Diary entries make a point of being satisfied with the
features of aiding accessibility for users with color blindness,
or users who are unable to perform certain tasks like reading
or typing in certain situations
e. Observations
i. Keeping the search bar accessible on every page helps users
to search from whatever page they are on at any point without
them having to move back and forth through the various
pages.
ii. Having a three-way split scrolling panel on the website
allows the user to scroll through the recipes with the video
playing on the left-hand side. It gives access to users with
different kinds of preferences to access what they prefer
without having to scroll up and down the pages again and
again
iii. The Mic, Speaker, inverted colors, font size changes are
features that are being used by users to adjust to their
comfort level and easily access the app increasing its usability
4. Open Card Sorting:
Open-card sorting is where participants create categories and concepts of their own and then order them. Open-card sorting helps in understanding how users relate to, organize, and define different concepts. It can lead to a better understanding of terms and definitions.
Step 1: Create Cards
Step 2: User must create their own categories while clubbing the
cards together
cards together
Step 3: Rename the categories and drag the cards into the categories
Step 4: Open Card Sorting Results
Open Card Sorting IA
5. Closed Card Sorting:
Closed-card sorting is when each participant gets a set of cards with information already written on them. They are limited to using these cards. This approach is very evaluative and is best when the terminology or concepts are well-defined and established. It can give you apparent patterns on the cards.
Step 1: Participants are given the cards and categories
Step 2: They categorize the cards with respect to what category
seems most fit
seems most fit
Closed Card Sorting IA
If you would like to read more details and continuation of this Case Study
Here is Part 1 and Part 2
