Chef Up.
Eat Healthy. Spend Less. Be Happy.
The problem
We’ve all thought about this, but it’s tough.
Why is cooking at home so hard?
Personally, I remember that, I’ve forever (and when I say forever every day since I turned 18) come home from a long day at school or a stressful day at work, cursed, and wondered if there was every a way to get healthy food…instantly…and inexpensively.
Over the years I’ve tried to find my inner-Ch’i with respect to cooking and I’ve realized that planning for meals in advance is the foremost reason that can motivate me to cook at home instead of getting on Seamless/ GrubHub app and ordering a simple, quick but fairly expensive 20$ dinner.
Meal planning has motivated me for two reasons:
I don’t lose time or get confused as to what to make after getting home each day
I avoid feeling like I always don’t have groceries for what I thought might be a good meal option for the night.
Now, I agree that food delivery is becoming the norm and companies like GrubHub and Seamless are more than doubling their user growth annually. Why? Because this is the answer to the quick and easy options users are seeking.
It takes most of us a bit of time to realize that cutting back on outside food is probably one of the easiest way to save, eat healthy and be happy in the long run.
These are three aspects of my life I really value and so I chose to conduct a holistic user experience and design study to evaluate the 3 P’s of UI-UX for my product — ChefUp.
The people
In this first phase, I interviewed users on their general eating habits for 30–60 mins each to understand their food routines and behaviors.
All users indicated that they had recently (<2yrs) realized that eating at home was a healthier and cheaper.
“In my mind if it’s something that is home cooked its invariably better and cheaper than outside.” — User
They had developed their own processes to ensure they did their best to eat at home. I noticed that they were following antiquated meal planning and grocery shopping practices despite being mainstream mobile app users.
The process
In order to identify trends and themes, I conducted an affinity mapping (see figure below) and noticed that 5 common trends emerged:
- Saving money was the number one motivation for people to eat at home
- Finding healthy options at restaurants was not easy nor cheap
- Users typically don’t have time to cook elaborate meals
- Reducing food wastage was important
- Without groceries, the meal plans would fall flat
The problem statement refined
While I started with health and wealth as key premises at the idea inception stage, through user research interviews and affinity mapping I soon realized that there were still other trends such as wastage, forgetting to buy groceries, etc. which made users unhappy.
Millennials are concerned about their eating and spending habits. How can we help make cooking at home easy, healthy and cheap.
“Cooking is a chore that I want to quickly get past and prepping for it is a big help.” — User
So this helped me shape the design for my prototype.
The prototype
In this phase I created a storyboard to test and demonstrate the usability of the application features. The features were designed in line with user feedback.
Following the storyboard, I designed a Beta version of the solution and subsequently developed Lo-Fi mock-up sketches.
The main features for the app include:
- Getting weekly notifications to plan meals for the week to save money by avoiding the need for GrubHub.
- Search for recipes using ‘healthy’ option.
- Option to pick a recipe randomly from favorites to make the meal planning process easier and faster.
- Cooking around an ingredient to help reduce wastage.
- Automated grocery list generation with the option to buy groceries online.
Four usability tests were conducted to see whether the app layout was intuitive and easy to follow. Success was defined as completing each task quickly i.e. under one minute.
For the first round of testing, Task 2 and Task 3 were identified as issues. The users were having difficulties navigating through the tasks in a flow that was determined to be user friendly. For instance, for Task 2, users went to the day view to ‘Randomly Select a Recipe’, instead of accessing the feature via a weekly view. For Task 3, the app was originally designed to toggle ingredients between the “Need” and “Have” columns. However, users failed to see these options and were confused once they reached the screen.
Therefore, the sketches were revised for the daily view to have additional options and include a more intuitive way of moving ingredients in the grocery list i.e. users need to select ‘edit’ prior to editing the grocery list.
The future
While the study confirms the need for an integrated meal planning app, there is still room to dive deep into additional features that can help motivate users like including saving goals and quantifying them.
Two ways to achieve this: 1. Track savings based on number of days meals were prepared at home 2. Recipes to include an average cost based on number of ingredients required.
