Chefy

Timeline: 10-week (Spring 2021)

Team: Elliana and Emma

Role: This was a team project. We all contributed to user research, UI design, and prototyping

Chefy is an app that makes it easier for college students to learn how to cook healthy meals. We applied user-centered design processes and strategies to create Chefy.

CLASS PROJECT

What should I cook for dinner? How can I maintain a healthy diet? What does "fold in the cheese" mean?

College students often start with little culinary knowledge and face certain limitations which make it challenging for them to cook.

PROBLEM

3 interviews. 5 design opportunities.

We interviewed three college students about their cooking experiences to understand their motivations and pain points. We did a thematic analysis to identify common trends and insights.

Design opportunities:

Fear of failure: People felt held back from trying new dishes for fear of improperly cooking it which would prevent them from enjoying the meal.

Different modes of learning: Sometimes only descriptions of the recipe aren’t enough so the user prefers to watch YouTube videos to follow along visual cues.

Convenience: Convenience in the form of quick recipes, accessible ingredients, minimal clean-up, and easy cooking techniques were factors the user prioritized when deciding what to cook.

Inexperience: There were many things the user didn’t know how to do such as how to grocery shop, how to cook for themselves, and how to search for new recipes because they didn’t know what they would like.

Learning to meal-prep: People wanted to learn how to meal-prep healthy foods they can take to work - saving time and money.

USER INTERVIEWS

Miro board with our thematic analysis.

How do college students cook?

Our user journey map allowed us to examine the users' interactions during cooking in greater detail. We chose to create a journey map for Hannah. We explored five cooking phases to determine users' behaviors and emotions:

Anticipation
Prepping
Cooking
Eating
Cleaning

JOURNEY MAPPING

Journey map.

Capturing user motivations

We created two personas that captured common behaviors we wanted to keep in mind while designing our tool. When capturing users' characteristics, we made sure to source each one to one of the participants we interviewed. This helped us to limit our assumptions and base our observations on real people.

PERSONAS

"Hannah" persona.

"Daniel" persona.

By creating a storyboard, we identified specific cooking scenarios for college students. The visual narrative helped us empathize with our users and communicated the context in which our tool might be used.

Visualizing the cooking process.

STORYBOARDING

Storyboard depicting a person cooking a familiar meal but getting tired of it.

Storyboard depicting a person cooking and cleaning up after.

We created a low-fidelity, interactive prototype to test our ideas. We focused on the following:

Fluidity: the pathway has a flow for the user.
Useful: the main features of the app are designed to address users' needs.
Communicative: interactions are communicated effectively; depictions of the interface are appropriate and logical.
Thorough: user flows support substantial evaluation of the interface and represent the design ideas well enough to be evaluated.

Conceptualizing the user flow.

LO-FI PROTOTYPE

3 user tests. 3 tasks.

We conducted interviews before and after the user interacted with the app. We specifically evaluated three tasks: searching for a recipe with a filter, changing their search preferences on their profile, and adding a recipe to the weekly meal plan. The lo-fi prototype was used to conduct this evaluation and the evaluation was used to make changes, such as adding more pages or altering symbols to better represent their actions, in the hi-fi prototype.

Takeaways:

The social media feature is unclear and should be made to encourage more interaction between users.
The preference settings in the profile aren't intuitive and need to be altered to be easily understandable.
The explore page is overwhelming to a new user and needs to be simplified to reduce cognitive overload.

USABILITY TESTS

The final deliverable.

The hi-fi prototype was the final product of our Chefy app that allowed for interaction between the apps' various screens. This prototype was altered using the feedback from the experience evaluation and the changes improved the users' ability to comprehend and interact with the various pathways including the meal planning, the profile, the explore page, and the community page. This prototype of the app can be used to create a fully functioning app in the future.

Takeaways:

Utilized color to clarify the various functions and highlight interactive buttons.
Screens have images and icons to enhance usability and discoverability.

HI-FI PROTOTYPE

Chefy is a cooking and meal prep app for college students.

Chefy is a group project originally driven by my team's personal pain points. We all loved cooking and understood how hard it was to decide what to cook, where to find recipes, and the struggles of being a college student wanting to prioritize health.

Below shows an overview of the process:

SOLUTION

Viewing design as a process with methods.

Challenges

Not having enough time for user research. This project only spanned three months so it was hard to find our target demographic to interview and have them participate in the usability tests.
Lacking a design system. My team and I had little UI experience during this time, making prototyping a very tedious process resulting in an inconsistent visual experience.

Successes

This project was the first time I went through an in-depth design process. I was exposed to various user-centered design methods that I can add to my toolbox as a designer.
While this project was completed remotely during the pandemic, my teammates were successful in maintaining clear communication with each other and progressed smoothly through the process and completed all deliverables on time.

REFLECTION