GreenSpoon Final Case Study
The Initial Idea
Quarantine and COVID-19 drastically changed a lot of lives from people being stuck in one place and adjusting their lifestyles. A large trend in the beginning or quarantine was health, fitness and wellness. Many people took advantage of being stuck in their homes to change their lifestyle and habits. We learned how to balance our personal life from our work life now that it was being mushed into one. Many took up cooking, baking, and fitness as an outlet from work and school. Between the three of us, we found that we have saved a lot of recipes but never got around to using them. We really enjoyed cooking and looking for new recipes, but sometimes, we did not know where to start or where to look for new recipes. We noticed that we would come across tik tok videos and save them, but we never came back to them. They just sat taking up space in our camera roll. Sure, cookbooks are a thing, but with our generation we like everything on our phones or digitized, and what were we looking for just was not out there.
When researching recipes, we felt that we did not have enough skill to complete certain recipes. While we wanted to expand on our skills, we needed a place to start and something to keep us motivated. Between the trends in health and fitness and our lack of motivation to up our culinary skills, we determined our how might we: how might we make cooking at home more enjoyable?
The Process
First Week
As a team we agreed that the design jam done a few classes prior was the best way to get started. With a time constraint and quick thinking, we knew that we would be able to get some initial ideas down on MURAL. After creating our HMW, we thought about who we wanted to target. Since we were most familiar with the college student and young adult lifestyle and because they are the most avid users of social media, we designed two personas that would be users to build our service around.
Nick is 23 years old and just graduated from college. He is now an active working professional who lives in the hustling city of New York. During his time in college, he mostly ate on campus, so his cooking skills are limited. Between his 5 AM workouts, product associate job at a tech firm, and a new eight-week low carb diet, Nick really does not have the time to dedicate time to look for recipes and try out new ones to find what works best for him.
Cammie is a 20-year-old student at UC Santa Barbara studying biomolecular engineering and lives in the dorms. She has three different leadership positions and spends most of her time in labs working with faculty. Even though she tries to work out in her dorm twice a week, she stress eats around exam time and mostly eats food from her dining halls. With her busy college schedule, she finds it hard to eat a balanced healthy meal that also takes less than 30 minutes to prepare.
We then completed a design sprint where we spent three minutes total but one minute per idea to brainstorm solutions that could solve the issue. We each came up with very different ideas based off the same How Might We, and it was interesting to see the cross sections of those ideas, and where we could combine them into one idea.
Cissie’s Ideas: an app that shows nearest healthy place with ratings & recommendations, subscription box platform with all the ingredients and instructions needed for specific chosen diet/meal plan, and a virtual assistant partner for healthy eating and cooking
Isay’s Ideas: app for meal planning, half meal-prep, and live masterclass cooking
Maddie’s Ideas: recipe platform that motivates users by connecting them with influencers and friends, app that helps users plan out their day/meals to prioritize the goals they set out, a personal platform specific towards user based on quiz and connects them with professional based on needs to create a balance and healthy lifestyle
We starred ideas that we liked and ones that we thought were similar and combined the ideas into one idea. After starring and combing ideas, we did an extreme rough sketch of what we wanted the app pages to look like.
We found the mini design sprint to be helpful in us narrowing and coming up with ideas. With all our diverse backgrounds and our knowledge, we were able to come up with a final product idea, and then we started to collect data. We created a google form with demographic questions and descriptive routine questions to determine what qualities would be the most successful for our audience. We sent out the surveys and awaited responses!
Second Week
After receiving feedback through our survey, we turned the results into a spreadsheet and analyzed the results of our survey. We determined that 90% cook at home at least twice a week, 88% make food for at one to two people, and 89% rate their skills as average. People enjoyed cooking at home, but not all of them had the time to meal prep or cook every single day. The majority of people were also concerned slightly with the food that they were ingesting and wanted to make and consume balanced meals.
We thought it was important to analyze the competition and see what other recipe platforms were in the market. To do this, we performed mini service analysis on Tasty, Yummly, Mealime, and Tender. Tasty and Yummly are the two biggest ones in the market and unfortunately, Tender was an app that actually failed. It was never fully developed and had a very limited marketing strategy.
We took different parts of each app and the results from our survey to curate the best possible features for our app. We found the one thing each app had in common was the aspect of adding recipes to a cookbook and ingredients to a shopping list. We knew that this was a feature we had to include. We were extremely surprised when we found out about Tender because the feature we came up with to stick out from our competition was having a food tinder. After doing some research on Tender, we saw its strengths and weaknesses and applied it to our project.
After we settled on the features we wanted for the app, we had to come up with a name for it. We wrote down all the words that came to mind when thinking about our app, and after brainstorming, we came up with the name GreenSpoon.
Third Week
This week we started our design process with wireframes and logo design. The logo was first drawn up in Procreate with a few different iterations before we settled on the one that we chose for the final. It was a lot of fun to take the words Green Spoon and experiment with different layouts, fonts, and icons. We placed the spoon in different areas and the words in different areas to see which one resonated the most with what we wanted the app to represent. The green color that we chose invokes a sense of wellness, freshness, warmth, and familiarity within our users, and the small hint of yellow invokes a sense happiness and simplicity. The “Baskerville” font reminds users of a farmhouse, greenhouse energy.
After we determined a style guide, we started on wireframe designs for the app. We designed a total of seven wireframes to lay out what the app pages would look like. On the first page, there was the option to “log in” or “sign up” on the top of it was the picture of a recipe that would be offered within the app and our slogan, “cooking a delicious meal has never been this easy.”
The second page was the home page. For the wireframe designs, the aspects of the app were kept very simple. We decided on a simple widget like customizable home page. This home page feels very familiar to Apple users with the rounded edges and font. Recipe Cards are longer than creator cards because they include the time it takes to make the dish, the number of calories, the rating of the dish, and the creator’s name. At the top of the page, we felt that it was important to have a search bar which would make it very easy and accessible for users to use keywords to search for the types of recipes they wanted to make whether it was in a specific time constraint or with a specific ingredient. Underneath the search bar, we wanted to include 3 buttons of the most common keywords used by the users.
The third page was simple and clean. It was the recipe page. In the recipe page, we wanted to include the ingredients and the directions for the recipe. At the top of the recipe cards, we put the quick facts each user would want to know about the recipe that they are making such as the skill level, the calories per serving, the time, the rating, and the chef. The other aspect that we included was the serving size that can be adjusted by the users. If the user was decreasing or increasing the number of servings they wanted, the app would adjust the recipe and ingredients to the new serving size.
Our star page is the GreenSpoon Recipe Tinder page. This page was where the original idea for our app came from. For the tinder, we kept it very simple and similar to the tinder platform. If the user likes the recipe, swipe right. If the user dislikes the recipe, swipe left. The interesting feature is if the user wants to cook the recipe or add ingredients right away to their shopping list they could swipe up or hit the chef’s hat.
We put thought into every single page of the app. The social portion of the app is meant to incentivize users and content creators. Creators are able to build a larger audience and a deeper connection with their audience. Users would be able to share their results with friends, attend classes with friends, and hold friends accountable to their meal plan. Every part of the app was thought out to provide users with the most optimal experience while using the app.
Fourth Week
During the fourth week, we refined the designs that we had and started to put design into them. We added the colors from our palette, chose icons, and pictures. This is arguably the most fun portion of the design process in my opinion. I always have fun putting color in and bringing the wireframes to life. When we put in small aesthetic pieces, we tweaked the design slightly because aspects look different in black and white versus color. We stayed with green being the main color and used the yellow as accent colors. Of course, we had to include the typical black and white for the lettering.
After completing the designs, we prototyped and sent out the link to friends and peers to get their feedback and opinion on what we had developed. While we awaited some responses, we started working more on the slide deck. The slide deck we continued with the theme of GreenSpoon in the green and yellow colors. We completed the presentation on Canva where we were all able to collaborate and put different aspects of the project into a cohesive presentation.
With the feedback that we received from peers, we were able to incorporate that into our presentation and think about ways in which we could grow GreenSpoon in the future. The features that we could include, and what we could do when COVID is over.
Fifth Week
On the last week approaching presentation time, we met to go over the presentation and practice. We timed each part individually as well as all of us a whole. This way we knew that we would hit our time marker while saying everything we needed to include. While doing our practice, we wanted to make our presentation more engaging, so we came up with the idea to send out the food tinder “prototype” google form. We wanted direct feedback from our peers on how they would “swipe” on the app platform.
Results, lessons learned & future steps
Results
Throughout this entire experience, we learned how to work across different time zones and how to collaborate in the best way based on our diverse backgrounds. We learned how to put our heads together to develop an idea and service that solved the pain points of our users. We each managed different aspects of the project and took the lead where we each had the most experience and expertise. We communicated with each other through text and email and held each other accountable for each part in the project. We set deadlines for ourselves individually and as a team which helped to keep us on track with where we wanted to go. Open and constant communication helped us to work cohesively as a team over zoom.
Accomplishments
· Successful mini design jams
· Gather demographic and market research
· Prototype initial wireframes
· Designs and prototype app
· Conduct user testing & gain feedback
· Adjust features and future steps
· Successful class presentation of GreenSpoon
Lessons learned & Future steps
Through the feedback we received, we learned what would work for users and what still frustrated them. Many of our users are still conflicted and troubled by the time constraints that they have. Some of them are starting to have in-person work and activities, so they time they have is becoming more and more valuable. To help rectify this, GreenSpoon might implement a service that helps users block out a few hours at the beginning of their week and sets them up with a meal plan and schedule to stick to.
The second frustration we faced from users was the waste of ingredients. Users if they were on a budget and time constraint wanted to use whatever they had on hand to make a meal or the cheapest ingredients possible or ingredients they can use for multiple recipes. For this pain point, GreenSpoon would develop a feature where users are able to enter the ingredients they have on hand or want to use. The app would then generate recipes that would be optimal for their use. Users would be able to enter in exact measurements of an ingredient if they knew how much they had left. This way users can reduce the amount of ingredients they purchase along with reducing food waste.
The main aspect of our product was thinking about it in quarantine and during peak COVID times. We did not think of how GreenSpoon would grow in the future when things return to normal times. However, there is a lot of room for GreenSpoon to grow with in -person cooking classes, food recommendations, and friends coming together to cook healthy and delicious meals.
Overall, the experience working on, designing, and creating GreenSpoon has been extremely rewarding. To see how far our idea and design has come when the first thing we started with was health and food. For some reason, we can never stay away from food in this class! It was amazing to hear such positive feedback from our peers saying they would download and use this app if it was in the app store right now. So maybe that’s what we’ll work on next, look out for GreenSpoon at an app store near you!
