HomeCooking Mobile App — a UX case study
The Homecooking app quickly provides users with easy recipes from ingredients on hand.
Project Overview
My Role: UX/UI Designer
My Team: Lavet Gripper (UX/UI Design), Leon Banks (UX/UI Design)
Duration: 3 weeks
Tools: Pen & Paper, Adobe XD, InVision, Miro, Trello, Google Suite
Summary: The task was given to my team to design a mobile app that must solve a real need in a set of humans’ everyday lives. After brainstorming possible solutions, we decided to direct our app towards cooking meals at home. Our hypothesis was people struggle to cook meals when left with limited ingredients in their kitchen. With a short timeline, we strived to build a mobile app that provides versatile recipes utilizing the ingredients they already have. We hope, with using this app, the long-term benefits would result in less food waste and ultimately save users money.
😫 The Problem
Through our research, we found that young professionals with time constraints and limited ingredients struggle to find quick and simple recipes to cook with.
🤔 The Challenge
How might we develop a mobile app to motivate professionals, ages 18–26, to cook more while saving them time?
😊 The Solution
We designed a mobile app that provides users with access to 30min or fewer recipes that incorporate ingredients they have.
Discovery Phase: Team Building and User Research
As a class project, the task was given to my team to design a mobile app that solves a real need in a set of humans’ everyday lives. During our brainstorming session, we generated four ideas. With 30 classmates voting, a mobile app that supports people cooking with ingredients in their fridge won.
To determine what target audience would gain most from a mobile recipe app we began with a proto-persona.
We presumed that Spencer, a 28-year-old real estate agent with a hectic work schedule and lacking personal life, who eats out often yet wants to save money, would best utilize this mobile recipe app. With additional traits of lacking domestic skills and creativity we believe that with the help of our app, we would solve Spencer’s problems by providing him recipes to motivate him to cook on his own and in the long run saving him money.
User Research
Interviews — We conducted six in-person interviews and found that our hypothesis was somewhat disproven. People were most concerned with cooking meals in a short amount of time and finding new recipes. They were less concerned with food waste.
Survey — Our survey involved 117 participants. The responses from our survey showed that, although people had no trouble creating meals with limited ingredients, they were interested in an app to find recipes utilizing their ingredients.
Below is a sampling from our developed affinity diagram, which we used to categorize user perception and discover our problem statement.
After analyzing our research, we concluded that people were most concerned with saving time. They would be motivated to cook more at home if given 30-minute recipes utilizing ingredients they already own. We designed a user persona that reflected the frustrations, habits, and goals of our target user.
Definition and Ideation
The Problem — Young professionals with time constraints and limited ingredients struggle to find quick and simple recipes to cook with.
To brainstorm possible solutions, we conducted a competitor analysis to see what methods of guided cooking worked for their consumers, what didn’t, and how we could execute features that would set us apart.
To further brainstorm essential features for our app, we exercised the “I Like, I Wish, What If” method. This activity inspired discussion for featured innovations that could solve our user’s frustrations with cooking at home. Some of our ideas stemmed from the research of negative and positive consumer reviews left for the companies listed in our competitor analysis. These reviews presented great insight into what consumers either liked or hoped for in order to fulfill their goal of cooking their next meal. We also considered statements from our qualitative data.
After reviewing potential ideas, we mapped out a feature prioritization matrix that would indicate our most highly impacted and prioritized features.
We decided to focus our efforts on four key features that would be potential gains and give our app a competitive advantage:
- limited ingredient input for simple recipes
- step by step videos on cooking instruction
- 30-minute recipes with provided calories
- cater to dietary restrictions
A user journey map was created for our persona, Kimberly, to help us envision her successfully using our app and becoming a loyal consumer. We used a relatable scenario that a busy working professional wants to cook dinner for the evening but has a very limited amount of time.
Developing: Prototyping & Testing
After several iterations, we finalized a user flow to begin our prototype.
With the guidance of the user flow, we began sketching low-fidelity screens. Each of our team members sketched out lo-fi wireframes, and we voted on which sketches to use for our lo-fi prototype.
Before digitizing our wireframes on Adobe XD, we created a usability plan.
Our tasks were:
- signup using Facebook
2. input ingredients and select a related recipe to cook
3. find a recipe
4. navigate to watch a video on following a recipe
A usability test was performed on our lo-fi prototype by 3 participants to see if our task flow was successful or led to frustration. We discovered:
😫 Frustrations —
- the onboarding process was very cluttered
- unclear interface, in terms of what buttons were clickable to complete a task
- navigation issues
We began designing our mid-fi prototype by applying recommendations from our usability test.
After testing our final mid-fi prototypes, our results were:
😫 Frustrations —
- lack of content in wireframes
- misleading icons
- too much yellow
😊 Proposed Solutions —
- provide real content for the mockup (photos, actual text, clickable items)
- display more than a recipe title to avoid time wasted by users (include duration, calories, ingredients)
- make an apparent logo
By this time, our deadline arrived, and we needed to present our case study. Although our research developments were deemed strong by our instructors, our prototype required a lot more work.
Hi-Fi Prototype (Independent)
Through the innate curiosity of wanting to know how our hi-fi prototype would look and test by incorporating the proposed solutions, I continued to iterate on our design.
One major problem was, users struggled to interpret the mid-fi prototype without content, which made it challenging to complete the tasks. By adding written and visual content to the wireframes, users could fully understand the layout of the app.
Additionally, to save users even more time using this app, I decided to include an AR food scanner to save ingredients faster in your “pantry” and get additional information on that ingredient, without having to look it up on Google.
Learnings and Future Steps
There are numerous competing food apps available, so focusing on features that solve the major issue of saving users time was vital in having a conceivably successful product. I believe that HomeCooking has excellent potential to motivate users to cook quickly and efficiently.
Working with my team was an enjoyable experience. To manage our project deliverables we began our meetings doing the SCRUM method, which emphasized teamwork, accountability, and iterated progress toward our project goals. We found this framework very useful as it kept us on track during tight deadlines.
🔮 Future steps would involve high-fidelity testing to receive user feedback and final iterations to have a successful final product.
