Kitchen Stories

Survey

I created an initial survey for people who are either new or home cooks to get an idea of how they plan their meals, how they cook, whether they use recipes or apps to cook, or use what they have in their pantries.

Here are a few takeaways:

• Most people plan their meals for the week and buy ingredients based on those meals

• Most people like to follow a recipe when creating a meal

• Half the participants liked to go grocery shopping for specific ingredients, while others liked to find make food based on what’s at home

• Most people have reported using Tasty as their favorite recipe apps, but Hello Fresh and Pinterest were also reported

• Most people would like to keep tabs on expiration date of their food items

• Most people use mobile, but some have reported using tablet when looking at recipes

Diary Studies & Feedback

For those who were willing to further help with the research, I assigned a diary study, where they download the Kitchen Stories app, use it for about a day and report back their thoughts about it.

Here are a few takeaways:

• 5 people participated in the study. 3 were beginner cooks, 2 were home cooks

• 3/5 people said they would use mobile. One noted that most people don’t have tablets

• 1/5 said they would use their tablet

• 1/5 said they would use both equally

• Most people have noted that they would use the new feature for inspiration or would just browse out of curiosity

• One noted they would play around with it a lot since they feel like most of the times, they can’t cook anything because thy’re missing one ingredient.

• 2/5 people said they would use this app once a week

• 1/5 said they would use it 1-2x a month

• 1/5 said they would use it a few times a week

• 1/5 said they would not use this app because the video was slow and the cooking steps were confusing.

Journey Map

I did a journey map based on the Kitchen Stories persona, which is the home cook and/or beginner cook. This helped me to think in the persona’s perspective and give an example of the mood they would go through to eventually use the feature in the app.

User Story + HMW

I then created a user story and a “how-might-we” (HMW) to think more in the persona’s perspective and find potential ways of how this app can help them solve their problems.

Application Map

After understanding the persona, it was time to think about where the new feature would live.

User Flow

This user flow shows how the user might go through the new feature to help find the right recipe without overspending.

Lo-fi Wireframes

Initial sketches were created to get my ideas going.

Hi-Fi Wireframes

Using the UI design research and the lo-fi wireframes, I created the high fidelity version to get ready for the prototyping phase.

Usability Testing

After making the wireframes, it was time to create the prototype, so people can interact with it and test the website. I used the rapid testing software Maze to find as many people as possible to try this app. This helped me to understand the pain points and / or things that were not working about the website. Here were some takeaways from the testing.

Final Look

With all the high-fidelity pages designed, I built up the final prototype with the included revisions.