Project Info
8 weeks, 2019 / Personal project
Deliverables
Process / High-fidelity prototype
Methods
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User interview
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Competitive analysis
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Affinity diagram
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User journey map
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Wireframing
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Usability testing
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High-fidelity prototyping
What is Crash Meal?
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Crash Meal is a totally customizable cooking assistant app based on users' preference setting and AI recommendation. It allows users to save time, get struggle-free recipes and automatically generated weekly meal plan.
Have you ever come across those.....
The Problem
I started my secondary research by exploring the related existing data, which shocks me a lot.
If cooking could be less time-consuming and stress-free?
I’m wondering about this issue by seeing those survey data and how hustling people heavily rely on takeouts, restaurant, and fast foods nowadays.
My Challenge:
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What kind of reasons that make people lost passion for self-made food?
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If there is a way to simplify the cooking process?
The Solution
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A totally customizable cooking assistant app based on users' preference setting and AI recommendation. It allows users to save time, get struggle-free recipes and automatically generated weekly meal plan.
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Major features walkthrough
Instantly finds matching recipes by scanning
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Design details to solve users pain points:
💡Other user scenarios of using image recognition
Totally personalized recipe recommendation and diet preference
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Design details to solve users pain points:
Efficient search,
get struggle-free and worthy trying recipes
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Design details to solve users pain points:
Reduce cook barriers by displaying the information users most concerning about
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Design details to solve users pain points:
Take the anxiety out of picking what to eat
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Plan meals for the entire week in a minutes
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Design details to solve users pain points:
Story behind the solution...
Understand target users: people who are too busy to cook.
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In-person User Interview
To better understand the issues I came up above,
I set up interviews’ objectives, target audience, and questions before starting the interviews.
Objectives of the user interview:
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Get know about the user’s habits when it comes to preparing a meal.
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Define how they solve some cooking related problems. What tools and approaches they use.
Target audience:
My target users are people who too busy or too lazy to cook.
Also, different types of users—both male and female, with different levels of experience in cooking, people with different familiarity with technologies,
Low motivation to try new recipes is the biggest pain point.
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User Interview Results
I analyzed the research results and noticed users have similar behavior and pain points.
Then I divided the data into 4 categories: ➡️
Who is this for?
From these interviews and conversations, I crafted user personas to better understand whom I am designing for.
I concentrated on 2 main types of target users:
Primary Persona
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People who work hard and don’t have enough time to cook
Secondary Persona
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People who want a stress-free cooking solution to explore more delicious recipes
Empathize
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User Journey Map
Based on data from in-person interviews, personas created, I organized my observations and categorized them using a customer journey map. This helped me expose pain points and areas for improvement along with the entire user journey.
How are the existing solutions?
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Competitive Analysis
I researched 8 similar apps out there and made a simple heuristic analysis for them, gave scores based on my own perspective and iOS platform reviews.
Brainstorming and Ideate
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Paper sketch
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After my research was complete I started to sketch down my ideas. I redesigned a few times just to have a variety.
Validate the concept
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Usability Testing
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Design variations: Home Screen
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Design variations: Search Page
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Design variations: Preference Setting
Finally, do users like this solution?
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Usability Testing results and feedback
6 / 7
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I tested and asked feedbacks from 7 users in the last round of usability testing, nearly all of them recognized the solution, could encourage them to explore more new recipes and get stress-free evening 🎉🎉.