Team Project, My Roles:
• Survey Creation (First & Second)
• Data Point System
• Social Media Inquiry
• User Persona
• User Insight Statement
• Lo-Fi Prototype Build and supplemental screen creation
• Hi-Fi Prototype Build and additional screen creation
• Future opportunities analysis
• All user testing takeaways and notes
As a group we were tasked with creating a solution to a common problem. This wide scope left room for lots of potential. Read below to see why we focused on the question, "Why would users fail to succeed at their own meal plan?"
Users do not have the time they need or do not want to spend a significant amount of time to prepare meals. This inhibits their process to plan, cook, and gain cooking experience based on their individual needs and goals.
How might we help busy, stressed users gain experience as home chefs and encourage quality time with their families over healthy meals?
This project began with a clearly laid out research plan for interviews and surveys followed by UX mapping. We further focused our research with a proto-persona and a coordinating proto-persona journey map.
"Just like everyone else I slip up here and there. But if I’ve had a stressful day then I’m probably going to end the day with fast food and some sweets."
"I try to make stuff on my own and sometimes it comes out so bad that I have to throw it out. I don’t have a lot of confidence when it comes to cooking."
"I can’t think of anything or how to make my food good. It ends up just being repetitive."
We decided to really get to the root source of the problem by narrowing our search and getting more specific. We focused on identifying a lead problem out of the five major pain points below in yellow and blue.
When looking generally at the user insights, their details were very broad. Their root causes, however, were not. Once we identified motivations behind overlapping themes, root causes began to reveal themselves.
We finally had the FIVE specific problems to narrow our focus further.
Our users were unable to stick to their meal plans because of a perceived frustration with Lack of Time.
This explained why users had so very many complaints. If a user also has problems with Lack of Experience, they can incur many other correlating issues.
For example:
• inaccurate time awareness can lead to simply not scheduling enough time to prepare a recipe.
• Not knowing how to complete complex steps in a recipe can make everything take longer.
• Or users were perhaps choosing recipes that were too advanced in the first place.
Most importantly, all of these were user pain points found in our research.
Users do not have the time they need or do not want to spend a significant amount of time to prepare meals. This inhibits their process to plan, cook, and gain cooking experience based on their individual needs and goals.
After taking a break regrouping we realized how much confirmation bias had allowed us to stray from our clear and simple research results.
We were trying to make the app do too much.
Back to the ‘drawing board’ we discussed only our latest research data and agreed these top features would help our users the most….
The app would guide the user to positive cooking experiences using whatever time they had. The onboarding screens showed key features the app has for new users and easily create an account or log in for existing users.
Certain pages asked users for preferences like:
• diet restrictions
• how much time they had to make meals
• what they wanted as a main ingredient
Options were available to:
• sync meal plans with your calendar
• "spicing up" meals with more ingredients
• making grocery lists
• watching step by step instructions
For user testing, our goals were simple:
• What were the users looking for when they opened the app?
• How would they navigate through it?
With the new high fidelity mocks, what interested users the most now?
Was it learning about new recipes, learning the onboarding, viewing step-by-step guides, or something else?
Again, we let them move around the app without giving them many instructions and took notes on their behavior.
From there, we instructed them on 4 tasks:
1. Signing up/logging in through onboarding
2. Find recipes using the main ingredient search
3. Reading a recipe from start to finish.
4. Go to your plan from any page and view your achievements
Discovering why people value time together through shared meals and quality cooking experiences, reminds and teaches us that a meal means more than we thought.
Eating right, cooking well, sharing time, planning ahead.
At their root these are all ways to provide. Whether it is providing for one’s self, a partner, a friend, or a child.
We all gain from confidently well prepared meals.
More information on this UX design sprint is available upon request in presentation form.
