Cooktoo
Cooking has become a rarity with the rise of delivery apps and experiencing isolation working from home. People are intrigued by meals created during cooking shows, but not enough to want to cook something on their own.
Overview
Problem Statement
User needs a way to search for culturally authentic recipes & plan meals quickly so that she can get back free time while establishing a sense of community.
Solution
Consolidate the many elements that go into finding a recipe and shopping for items while adding a feature to add friends via calendar invite to cook with you.
Scope of Work
I spoke to a partner who mentioned that he enjoyed watching cooking channels, but rarely ever cooked anything himself. He moved away from his country at a young age and didn’t recall many of the dishes from his culture – it wasn’t something that carried over for him at home. This prompted me to speak with more people, and I learned that people want to cook; however, too much goes into planning and shopping for the right ingredients to match their dietary restrictions – juggling too many things to do so. People also find it difficult to locate authentic recipes from their own cultures (and others) and miss that feeling of community. This was important to me because I too get tied up and don’t cook for very similar reasons.
For the initial steps, I wanted to create something that simplified the planning process with a minimal learning curve.
RESEARCH
After speaking to my partner, I began drafting questions to survey 4 people to discover how people felt about cooking, the last time they cooked or tried a new recipe, etc. After completing this task, I extracted critical, qualitative data from their answers to begin affinity mapping - a process that is utilized to synthesize information to locate trends that can be categorized.
Persona
Once I was able to categorize the notes, I formulated some “I” statements to help me with developing the persona that will be utilized for the remainder of the project. Creating a persona from the research allows me to bring to life an existing person who I will be creating a solution for – it continues to keep the project focused on the end user.
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User Flow
Once I was able to categorize the notes, I formulated some “I” statements to help me with developing the persona that will be utilized for the remainder of the project. Creating a persona from the research allows me to bring to life an existing person who I will be creating a solution for – it continues to keep the project focused on the end user.
DESIGN
After synthesizing and assessing the research information provided, I began to visualize some solutions in the form of a mobile app. I sketched a few low-fidelity concepts to get some features out of my head. I found myself getting excited from the many potential solutions, going too far and having to narrow back down often. I thought of the current recipe apps out there and recalled that I didn’t want to create a huge learning curve for users, so I kept the main framework of most and built the new features from there. I began putting together a grayscale mid-fidelity wireframe in Figma.
As it came to life, I started to develop a clickable prototype by attaching the flow that connects each screen.
User Testing
To manage truthful responses from users during testing, I carefully wrote down a couple tasks to ask them to perform without leading.
Task 1: Locate an authentic Latin recipe and select it
Task 2: Locate a substitution list & add an ingredient that made sense to them to the cart.
Users could complete each task in < 90 seconds, but each user still provided me with some interesting takeaways.
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Takeaways + Insights
I realized that while it was quickly selected, each user had issues figuring out that the “star” on a recipe’s photo meant it was authentic. They only figured it out by clicking by mistake or guessing.
The second interesting aspect was that users would locate the “healthy alt” tab in <5 seconds but toggle back and forth a few times before figuring out what they should select. I suspect this while this was mainly due to the use of “lorem ipsum” text, the different shades of grey used were a factor as well; it made me think that it might be best to swap the current colors of the text between the two tabs as the light grey can be seen more as “older/already clicked” vs. drawing attention to what is new or in this case, the substitution.
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Iterations
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