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"Cooking Confidence"
Responsive Web-Application
Context
Project Objective:
To design a responsive web app for recipes that meets the needs of its users and solves the problems they are facing with existing recipe apps.
My Role:
UX/UI Designer responsible for bringing this project from conception to delivery
Project Duration:
January 2024 - July 2024
5Ws
User Personas
Jessica Vasquez
Age: 28 Years Old
Occupation: Stay-at-home-Mom
Interests/Hobbies: Cooking, painting, watching movies on the big projector screen, and going on walks with her daughter.
Cooking Experience: Experienced
“Cooking comes second nature to me. I practically breathe it. It comes naturally to me and my husband, but why is baby food so difficult? It’s literally easier to make, right?”
Sam Ko
Age: 30
Occupation: Full-time Pharmacy student, part-time intern at a hospital
Interests/Hobbies: reading in his spare time, working out in the morning before class
Experience with Cooking: Intermediate
“My son will know someday what it's like to work your butt off for something. For now, though, he just wants food. That's okay too”
Claire Montgomery
Age: 32
Occupation: Freelance Artist
Hobbies/Interests: Hiking, meditation, watching K-dramas
Experience with Cooking: Novice
”Food looks super tasty, and I want my family to experience a home cooked meal…by me, but also, not by me. Maybe someday though.”
MVP Objective
This app will provide an easy to understand and easy to use resource for parents and caregivers alike to research, save and make delicious eats for their children and families overall. It will provide knowledge to allow users to learn new things about various topics related to feeding their loved ones. This will be the all-in-one place to go for all things food for families.
Userflow
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Low-Fidelity Wireframes
Welcome
Ingredient View
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Home
Direction View
Prototyping Feedback
Design System
Typography
Color Palette
UI Elements
High-Fidelity Wireframes
Welcome
Ingredient View
Select Preferences
Cart
Mark As Tried
Home
Direction View
Retrospective
What Went Well?
-Creating User Personas: I think this personally came natural to me, as I love creating stories and characters in my personal life as well. It was easy to create different personalities that may interact with the app.
-Usability Testing/User Interviews: The entire process was insightful and taught me that users just want things kept simple and easy. This challenges me in a good way, and teaches me to shift priorities as the process evolves.
-Prototyping: I find the process of prototyping to be fun, so this was an easy part of the task, however the way I laid out the prototypes could have been improved (placing all the prototypes onto 1 page/file rather than 2 separate files).
What Didn't Go Well?
-Defining Success Metrics: I personally found it easy to figure out the Quantitative part of the success metrics, but struggled to think of Qualitative. I still don’t feel confident in the Qualitative metrics I wrote out.
-Separating Needs From Wants: It’s easy in my mind to think in some way it’s justifiable to have every feature and function as a need. In some way, shape, or form, maybe someone would actually need it.
-Letting Go: I struggle with letting go of things that I might have thought the app needs, but the user might have no use for.
-Excluding Bias: I find that I insert myself, my opinions, and my experience into the app building process. Especially being a potential user, myself, it can be hard to leave my biases out. It’s hard to be empathetic without completely building for myself in the end.
-KISS: It’s fun coming up with features and functions, and the idea of adding all of these neat things into the app is exciting. However, too many things may make the user experience suffer. It may be too cluttered, and many of the things that would be cool to add may just impede the natural flow users may work through.
How to Improve?
- Empathizing is good, but try not to insert myself too much, as I don’t want the study to have bias.
- Features are cool and fun, but it’s better for users if the interface is more simple to use. Less clicks are important too - users don’t want to work hard to get to their destination.
- For needs vs. wants, dive deeper. Imagine the worst case scenario for every function and feature. “Can the app survive without this?” “Can the user still get done what they need to?”
- Study up on what defines a Qualitative success metric for various apps and features.
Thank you for your time
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