GreenSpoon Creative Process
Problem Statement
How might we make the home cooking experience more enjoyable and feasible?
Week 1
This week our team met each other for the first time and completed the team charter together to warm up the team. We were all able to open up our minds and stay on the same page to work toward our goal! Through this process, we were not only to know each other better in person but also each member’s soft and hard skills as well as working habits, which set a great foundation for our project later.
Then we started brainstorming ideas during our studio time together in class. After communicating our interests and topics that we all cared about in society, we decided that we wanted to focus on the nutrition and wellness theme for our final project, targeting young working professionals and college students with busy schedules. Then we started on the empathize stage by using a mind-mapping section to quickly branch out on this theme and wrote down pain points or factors that we discovered. Some main pain points and challenges of cooking at home included: lack of motivation, not knowing many recipes, and limited time and energy for the activity. After connecting the dots, we did some further research on each large area. Then we each wrote down a couple of how might we questions that was targeting the pain points. After voting and combining the ones that we liked, we defined the problem to be “How might we make cooking at home more enjoyable and feasible for beginners?”
After defining the problem, we completed two personas to further analyze our target users — one as a recent graduated working professional and the other as a college student.
Next step we started forming survey and interview questions. After grouping them into four different categories, we sent the survey out using google form.
Week 2
This week while waiting for the survey results and conducting 1on1 interviews, we finished our stakeholder map and started working on competitor analysis. We were able to find and analyze four apps/platforms. We also went in and did a more detailed analysis of the user interface of these apps/platforms.
After we got enough quantitative and qualitative data from the research, we put all information in a google chart to better understand the numbers and inputs. We then discussed and analyzed the results and found that the main reason that people meal prep was because of health, budget, allergies, and control over ingredients. And the four main pain points included time, energy, lack of skills, and lack of recipe resources. Some insights included:
1. majority of people even if they live with others mainly cook for themselves.
2. meal prep is not common for the majority of people however people want to because it helps them save time during the week.
3. the number of people who do meal prep love it and find it really helpful.
4. most people rate their cooking skills as average, being they can follow a recipe but not so much spontaneous cooking.
Week 3
This week we started the ideation stage. Based on the research results, we decided to improve users’ home cooking experiences by designing a recipe platform that motivates users by connecting them with influencers and friends in an app format. We first brainstormed and finalized the name of our service. After listing out some keywords of our service, we proposed several names. We were choosing between GreenSpoon and Social Kitchen and finalized it to be GreenSpoon to zoom in onto the healthy aspect.
Then we were able to establish a user flow for the app. Some feature included:
1. recipe tinder (video tutorials / attached recipe cards)
2. masterclasses from the influencers (live/asynchronous), premium: highly-rated chefs/restaurant features.
3. progress (social aspect), share results with friends.
Additionally, all recipes would have nutritional info; influencers are encouraged to provide substitutes; forum style for each recipe (people make different versions); DM style troubleshooting with cooking influencers.
After finalizing some features and details, we were able to produce an initial wireframe.
Week 4
This week, we continued to work on the prototyping stage of our service which was mostly on user interfaces. After doing a small user testing on the wireframe, we iterated some parts of the user interface. And after finalizing the user flow, we were working on the style guide of the service. We used Roboto as the text typography and Baskerville as the title to foster this country/cooking/homemade feeling. And we decide to use a forest green as the main color and a light mustard yellow as the accent color to promote the healthy, lively, wellness aspect of the service. And we just kept the icons pretty simple since there will be different pictures of dishes that were full of details and we didn’t want the icons to be complicated as well. And after some brainstorming and iterations, we finalized our logo mark.
After adding colors and pictures to our wireframe, we finished our V1.0 prototype and sent it out for user testing.
While waiting for the results and feedback, we started working on the presentation slides and discussing our storytelling style. We focused on the flow to tell a good story and so that we were seamlessly able to transition between our sections (research, product, and feedback).
Week 5
This week we continued to refine and iterate our prototype based on user testing feedback. Some positive feedbacks that we got were that our service was engaging, intuitive, and useful for dietary restriction and etc. However, some functions were rather limited. Skill levels were not indicated. And some people thought that video tutorials were hard to follow while cooking. One user test noted that content should include both videos and recipe cards, not just videos, because it will be more accessible for those who have trouble following video lesson formats. In response, we made the recipe cards and video tutorials go hand-in-hand, and either format may be available for a certain recipe. Adjustings were made based on some feedback.
We finished up our presentation this week and started practicing the presentation. We met on Tuesday to do a final practice round before the final presentation. We were also able to discuss and design a Google form prototype of the recipe tinder to send out to the audience during our presentation. Now we were so excited to showcase our service!
What we learned
Although our proposed service has multiple features for different kinds of engagement, it is not comprehensive enough to tackle every obstacle that our survey participants identified as a barrier to cooking at home. Even after testing with our user base, our research subjects noted the following:
- Time: For them, time is a commodity, and it is often difficult to commit to live or asynchronous classes with busy work life as a young adult. To address this, GreenSpoon might consider developing a meal-prep-only option, which will allow users to make multiple recipes in a single day for future consumption.
- Ingredients: Oftentimes, ingredients come in quantities that make it hard to justify the purchase. Users were sometimes turned away from recipes because of a long ingredient list and hard-to-find ingredients. GreenSpoon might address this by offering recipes and/or filters that allow users to work with a certain number of ingredients.
- Online Learning: As seen from the pandemic, taking classes online can be a draining experience. It would be interesting to see how GreenSpoon might approach fostering in-person social cooking experiences by identifying nearby users who are open to sharing ingredients, skills, equipment, etc.
Some challenges that we faced:
- All team members lived in different geographical locations and we had to work across a 3 hour time difference. To work things out, we delegated tasks so that each person was able to work on their own time independently. We also had a large project plan to keep everyone on track. Effective and open communication was also key to our team.
- Going back and forth from prototypes to insights was a little difficult and tiring. But we had to make sure that each feature is relevant to our research findings so this back and forth was expected because a design process should always be agile.
Lesson Learned through this creative process:
- During the brainstorming and researching phase of a project, what I learned was that don’t worry about getting it right, the creative process is always messy, and shouldn’t stay organized because this was the divergent stage. And as a group, finding the shared motivation and empathy is also significant. Some questions that can be asked are like: Why are we doing this project? What are we exploring or discovering here? What questions are we asking? Do we love our idea?
- I also learned how finding the right problem to solve is the first and a significant step into a project. We would imagine it to be simple, but sometimes we can be misled by the problem. We found that breaking down the challenge into small pieces of problems or pain points through analysis, and then form the new idea or new problem through synthesis in an analogical and convergent way was very helpful. I found this process super practical and can direct the project and people’s thoughts in a clear direction especially working in a team where team members all have different perspectives.
- Another thing that I learned was that we should always keep ideas and works transparently with our teammates. Even though these might be ideas and thoughts that we think would never going to work, we should still throw them out there. It might not work, but it might inspire other people and sometimes brilliant ideas come from these ideas that we thought would never work. So never hesitate to show your thought process.
Conclusion
I really valued this opportunity to work on a whole service design project in a team. I was able to learn a lot from not only my amazing teammates but also my peers in this class. All the feedback that we got were very honest and valuable. In future steps, GreenSpoon is going to lean towards in-person touchpoints to tap into the social nature of cooking and continue to address accessibility challenges for ingredients and equipment.
