EZ Food App

Jason Eng

EZ Food App • 2023

#UX Research #UI Design #Graphic Design

Tools: Balsamiq Wireframes • Figma

THE DESIGN CHALLENGE

As a student, I empathised that with the stress of studying on top of the build-up of responsibilities, it becomes increasingly difficult to eat healthy. Even in attempts to cook at home, this endeavour for students is either quite expensive or the food ends up going to waste.

Studies have proven that home cooked meals are healthier than takeout and better supports immune health and reduces the risk of food related illnesses such as high blood pressure and diabetes.

How can we encourage people to cook at home and eat healthier?

01 Empathise

"Conduct research to understand the user needs and the market they're in."

RESEARCH PLAN

This is the research plan that I followed:

By conducting interviews first, I was able to build on the information gathered in my literary research and to support and quantify these findings, I conducted a survey.

Questions centred around the underlying reasons why people like or dislike cooking. By investigating these motivations, we can better formulate approaches to tackle our design problem.

Why don't you cook at home?

RESEARCH FINDINGS

02 Define

"Clarify what the goals are and what needs to be solved."

Organising my findings

AFFINITY DIAGRAM

To organise my research findings, I created an affinity diagram - a way to visualise my findings and identify key information and ideas.

Synthesising:

PERSONAS

By using personas, we can better understand our users and focus on their needs. As we imagine these personas within the context of our problem, we can better anticipate their next actions and imagine what they would need, which would help in establishing a final solution.

UNIVERSITY STUDENT

Penelope

This is Penelope, she struggles to balance her university studies, part time work and other responsibilities. Despite this, she tries to maintain a healthy diet by cooking at home, but in vain, she lacks the time and effort to cook dishes with the remaining ingredients in her fridge. She finds it easier to throw away the leftover ingredients in her fridge than to think of recipes that will use them.

ACCOUNTANT

Hunter

This is Hunter, he often tries to cook for himself because he tries to maintain a healthy lifestyle and eating. However, he is usually lazy to cook and would rather scroll on social media than spend this time cooking. His girlfriend is his biggest motivation for him to cook, but when he does, he fails to plan accordingly and ends up with leftover ingredients that he doesn’t know how to use elsewise.

5 WHYS

By using this technique, we can try to determine the root cause of a problem by successively asking the question “Why?”.

Our new problem:

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Research by Rogelberg et.al in 2011 on "Wasted Time and Money in Meetings Increasing Return on Investment" explores the costs associated with poor planning. So, our problem statement then becomes as follows:

"How can we create a medium for users in which they can effectively plan and reduce the risks of failure when using their leftover ingredients to cook?"

03 Ideate

"Challenge assumptions, create options and ideas to tackle the problems."

THE SOLUTION

The application is a short video viewing platform that will help users find quick and easy recipes with a specific ingredient in mind.

By modelling this application after other popular social media applications, we can generate a sense of familiarity with our users and creating a more compelling user experience.  

To further this idea, users can connect with their nest hub device to follow along to recipes in real-time.

First draft...

INITIAL WIREFRAMES & USER FLOWS

Here shows my first set of wireframes and user flows.

At this stage, I conducted some initial user testing and made some slight changes to improve the user experience. For example:

More recipe cards appear on each page so that users spend less time scrolling through content.

By drawing from UI designs that people are familiar with, users better understand now to navigate the interface.

Key features such as "Saved", "Friends" and "Reposted" appear in more easily accessible areas of the UI.