Project Journey

Motivation

Busy young adults, particularly those new to cooking, often face challenges in preparing nutritious meals due to their limited time, kitchen resources, and lack of culinary skills. This struggle frequently leads to unbalanced diets and inadequate nutrition, which can negatively impact their overall well-being. We aim to create an app that empowers these individuals by simplifying meal preparation and helping them make healthier choices effortlessly. By providing easy, enjoyable, and nutritionally balanced meal ideas tailored to their specific needs and goals, the app encourages users to develop sustainable healthy eating habits. Ultimately, we want to make cooking an enjoyable and rewarding experience, ensuring young adults can confidently support their dietary needs while managing their busy lives.

Across all five apps analyzed, we found that none of them specifically target young adults with little to no cooking experience. Some of the recipes were complex and not necessarily easy for beginners to follow along. In addition, all apps required a paid subscription to be able to access vital information and features such as in-depth nutritional information and adequately personalized recipes. To address these gaps, we’ll include calorie, nutrition, vitamin, and food group information for each recipe, and allow the user to have a customized recipe selection depending on their personal preferences and dietary restrictions, types, and goals. Another gap was a lack of cuisine variety, which we will address by providing a large selection of recipes under a wide variety of cuisines. We can also aim to increase the adaptability so that the app usage is not confined to only iOS and Android-supported devices.

We interviewed a total of 13 young adults of ages between 19 and 24 years old

Out of these participants:

• 13/13 were beginner cooks, meaning they have less than 2 years of experience cooking for themselves

• 7/13 were female and 6/13 were male

• 7/13 were younger than 21 years old, and 6/13 were 21 years old or older

• 4/13 had dietary restrictions including vegetarian, gluten-free, and dairy-free diets

• All had different majors

1. Lack of time from overwhelming responsibilities

Young adults often struggle to make time to cook meals due to academic and work-related responsibilities, leading them to turn to pre-prepared or outside alternatives.

• “Lack of time is a big factor. I have a lot of things to handle, including work and studying, so it’s hard to find time to cook.”

• “I want to cook more but I don’t have time.”

• "I cannot cook lunch since I only have a 30 minute break at lunchtime.”

• "Even simple preparation can add up to four hours... I don't think cooking is a very efficient thing to do.”

2. Limited budget for groceries

While young adults would ideally want to eat healthier, more balanced meals, they find that it’s more expensive to buy healthier ingredients and cook healthier foods. 

• “Healthy food is too expensive.”

• "Healthy eating is important, but it's expensive to maintain."

• "It’s more expensive to get stuff that’s gluten-free or dairy-free."

3. Want to simplify the cooking and nutrition process

Young adults express that easy-to-make and simple meals, as well as easily understandable recipes, would greatly help them to reach their eating goals. Additionally, many found that other apps were unnecessarily complicated.

• (Regarding what the user desires) “Anything that helps find meals that are easy to make that are still healthy, and then just places where you can find groceries for affordable prices.”

• “I used to use MyFitnessPal to track [calories and macronutrients] but stopped because it took too much work and the information was inaccurate.”

• "I tried a nutrition tracking app, but entering ingredients manually was too cumbersome."

• “I find it annoying to keep looking back and forth between the recipe and what I’m making.”

• “I do enjoy cooking. Actually, it's it's like, kind of stress relief. But what I don't like is deciding what to cook. That takes a while.”

4. Lack of cooking skills

Another reason why adults veer away from cooking is because they don’t have the skills and knowledge to be able to cook at a level that satisfies their needs.

• "If I had someone to teach me recipes, I think I would cook more often."

• "I only know a few recipes, so cooking feels repetitive."

• "I don’t enjoy cooking because what I cook doesn’t taste that good."

5. Lack of interest in and enjoyment of cooking

Young adults perceive cooking as an obligation rather than an enjoyable activity. They would enjoy cooking more if it was an experience that could be shared with others.

• "I see cooking as a chore."

• “I think cooking used to be a social activity but is now an obligation.”

• “I always cook by myself but I think cooking with others would be more fun.”

Description: This persona describes Lily Morgan, a 20-year-old computer science major at the University of California, Irvine. She is very busy and needs to juggle classes and social events, thus resulting in little time or motivation to cook. She lives in an apartment and does not have a car, making grocery shopping very inconvenient. Since being busy and not a good cook, she orders a lot of takeout and relies on frozen food, but she wants to eat healthier and learn how to cook, her goal is to cook every day and save money and time as much as possible.

Who we designed this persona after: The persona we designed here is specifically based on students who lack time, money, and cooking skills due to life or school pressures.

Research findings that influenced this persona:  Some interviewees said that they do not have enough time since they need to handle both school work and personal responsibilities. Some of the interviewees also mentioned that they rely on takeout and frozen food since they want to save time, and lack cooking skills, they want to cook every day and eat healthily, some of them do not have transportation and the price of ingredients are too expensive, in this case, we included all these aspects in our persona to let our team have a figurative person. 

Our explore recipe interface was inspired by shopping apps that exist in the marketplace, our design minimizes redundancy and makes the page clean and simple. The second image is the introduction and preparation interface of each recipe, the design here is inspired by the interviewees, they said that they lack cooking experience, so we added the preparation description as well as the video in this low fi to help the users to make it more convenient.  Since we were thinking about healthy eating, we have included a health log in the design of the third page, which is designed to be used to check your nutritional intake and to achieve a healthy diet.  The last three low-fi images are our alternative low fi, which includes a weekly challenge feature, designed to get users more motivated to eat healthy meals, and the challenge can make the process of eating healthy meals more motivating and fun. The weekly challenge also includes the process of friends' challenges and global users, at the same time it provides suggestions and share recipe features. all of which can help users better stick to eating healthy meals. 

> Click here for the Figma file!

From In-Class Peer Feedback

Problem: The text can be hard to read.

Solution: We adjusted the standard text size from 14 to 18.

Problem: The filtering page is “overwhelming,” feels like “information overload,” and the headers are unclear.

Solution: We changed the layout from two columns to a single column so filtering options span across the entire page. We also used line spacers to separate categories and made the categories collapsable. We changed the header “modality” to “purchase method.”

Problem: The white text blends in with the light green color of the buttons.

Solution: We changed the light green to dark green for better color contrast, which is our primary color used in the designs.

Problem: It’s unnecessary to have an entirely separate page for a friends list.

Solution: We excluded this from the main flow.

Problem: The selected tab in the navigation bar is not distinct enough, making it hard to tell which tab is active.

Solution: We darkened the selected tab and lightened the unselected ones, increasing contrast for better visibility.

From Mini-Evaluations

Problem: The ability to change the number of servings a recipe makes is easy to miss.

Solution: We changed the simple box design to a dropdown with an arrow indicating that it’s clickable.

Problem: It’s unclear that you are able to click on the ingredients and equipment needed for a recipe.

Solution: We added an info icon that informs the user that they can click on underlined green text to search for the ingredients and equipment needed for a recipe.

Problem: The screens look a bit bland.

Solution: We added more color throughout the screens in the form of icons, buttons, and other accents.

Problem: Everything on the page to search for friends and add them was confusing. Participants were frustrated and displeased with this page.

Solution: We ended up just leaving out this page since we already had 3 different parts of the flow that were more central to the app.

Problem: Colors did not follow a consistent color scheme with primary, secondary, and tertiary colors.

Solution: We edited the color palette to have more variations of tones and fewer colors for consistency. On each page, we made sure to follow a consistent color scheme with primary, secondary, and accent colors.

Problem: In the initial design of hi-fi, there are some black areas in the screens without content. 

Solution: We reformed the layout and ensure there are no blank areas on the screens. 

> Click here to view the final prototype!

We've learned a lot during this quarter. In the initial weeks of the quarter, we learned how to use who, what, where, and why to detect problems before creating "how might we..."  problem statements, which helped us have a clear design goal for the rest of the project. 

We also learned how to create a competitive analysis and analyzed the many healthy eating apps that already exist on the market, and in the process, we got a good idea of the design styles of these apps. At the same time, we also use Table to compare different apps with the same criteria, which helps us to find out the strengths and weaknesses of the apps that exist in the market, understand the optimization direction of the app that we want to design, and avoid the shortcomings of the apps in the market for our apps. 

After determining the basic design concepts and guidelines, we conducted interviews with people who have busy lives and have no experience in cooking. In the process, we learned how to guide the interviewees to answer the questions in more detail and how to control the atmosphere during the interviews to make the interviewees more relaxed, and their interview responses were recorded and used for our analysis. As for the results of the interviews, we analyzed them in detail separately, judged their troubles and problems by the tone and content of their interviews, and categorized and summarized all the results. And these insights and analyses gave us a good understanding of how to understand the needs and hindrances of the target group on the way to design, and helped us design accordingly. 

We also created a persona and two storyboards later in the design. The persona worked well to give us a virtual user image and unify the characteristics of all the interviewees, allowing us to conceptualize the design around the persona and create a cohesive understanding of who we're designing for. Storyboards are a great way to give us scenarios of how users use the product and allow the product to be designed through stories so that we can simulate the daily lives of users and find out what problems they may encounter when using the product. 

In the low-fi design, we learned how to create an initial design framework through manuscripts, which served us well for the mid-fi and high-fi designs. In the subsequent mid-fi and high-fi, we visualized the content based on the drawn low-fi images and designed it with Figma. In the final High fi design, we analyzed Persona and Storyboards to design the corresponding functions, and at the same time, we also referred to the page layout styles of many existing software and decided on the functions that should be included in the final software after consultation. After all that, we took a YouTube tour of Figma and learned how to use prototypes to make each of the frames relate to each other and ultimately make a clickable app.

Overall, this quarter has been a valuable experience and we have learned a lot about UX research and design procedures that will help us in the future of our professional journeys.

If we had more time, we would like to do the following:

• Create recipe pages that are more step-by-step so it's even more easily understood by users who have little experience with cooking.

• Allow users to comment on individual sections of the recipe for purposes such as clarifying instructions, adding input, and addressing commonly asked questions.

• Implement a "share" feature that enables users to send recipes to friends.

• Make the health log more comprehensive and backed by research, linking users to articles and studies explaining the functions, benefits, and possibly harmful aspects of various parts of health.

• Provide specific health advice tailored to the user based off of things such as their height, weight, lifestyle, and dietary restrictions.

• Create a interactive filter on the explore recipes page to show how the user can filter for multiple cuisines, budget, and time to cook a meal