COOKIREI CASE STUDY

Help home cooks gather recipes from anywhere and use them efficiently

Project type
Solo student project

Timeline
Oct 2021 - Feb 2022 (20 weeks)

My role
Product Designer
UX Researcher

Tools used
Figma
Adobe Illustrator

Project Brief

The goal of this project was to develop a possible solution to one of the problems that are meaningful to me, which led to the idea of home cooking.

Project Overview

I develop a mobile app called COOKIREI that allows home cooks to easily collect and manage their recipes. This project will involve researching, synthesizing, ideating, designing, and validating an appropriate solution to meet the needs of the current problem space.

GENERAL PROBLEM

Why is it so difficult to decide what to cook?

“Young adults want to save money by cooking more, but it takes a long time to decide what to cook. They end up ordering food delivery or cooking the same thing every day, which wastes money and time and exhausts them.” So what makes it so difficult to choose? How can we improve it?

SOLUTION PREVIEW

The way to collect & manage recipes is key

Let's dive into the PROCESS

Using Design Thinking to achieve this solution

RESEARCH

Why is this problem important?

I try to go in with as little bias or influence as possible and get my initial thoughts rolling to the root problem. And I started with the general problem space I want to work within: issues of home cooking. Because I don't have a very tight time constraint, I decided to use a more in-depth UX research method to gather and collect these attitudinal data.

These included: Secondary Research, Screener Survey, and In-depth interview.

📋 Secondary Research & Screener Survey

🗣 In-depth interviews with 4 home cooks ages 18 - 35 about their home cooking experiences

I asked questions about:

  1. How they prepared meals at home

  2. How they chose to cook certain things over others

  3. Their cooking challenges

DATA SYNTHESIS

Then, which point do I try to address?

“My interviewees choose what to cook based on family recipes, Google searches, specific websites, YouTube channels they are familiar with, and things they save on their phones.”

Based on the trends in my affinity map, I've noticed 9 insights into 3 main themes:

  1. Making Decision

  2. Organize Recipe

  3. Tracking Food

However, based on the qualitative research, I observed that all my users know exactly what website they need to find recipes, so that is not a problem. The problem here is the way they save them on their phone, which leads me to the main problem later.

Affinity Mapping

 

Whose problem am I addressing?

DEFINE THE PROBLEM

It is critical to have a way to collect all recipes they love and use them efficiently

My users know how to find new recipes from multiple sources, online or offline. So getting new recipes is not a problem. Trying to pick the right recipes to cook from their huge collections is difficult and time-consuming!

 

IDEATE

So, what is the potential solution?

2 ideas came to mind, but I chose the idea that provided the most value to users in the least amount of time.

A COOKING-NOTE APP
A platform where people can create their own systems to store recipes.
- Inspired by Notion App -

A BOOKMARK APP
A place where people can SAVE all the recipes they want by bookmark, by link, or by snap
- Inspired by Pocket App -

SKETCH + WIREFRAME + HIGH FIDELITY DESIGN

And how can I visualize my solution?

✏️ From sketches …

My ideas were visualized with sketches for each user flow, to address my users’ pain points.

… 💻 then refined wireframes …

Address 3 main issues discovered during the guerilla usability test on the sketches

Iterate for key issues #1, #2

  1. Don’t know how to add tags when adding a recipe.

  2. After filling in all sections when adding a recipe, users is hard to find the small "Save" button on the right corner.

Iterate for key issue #3

3. The “Substitution” treatment was too different.

…✌️ and developed High Fidelity Mockups …

Refine my solutions for the Hi-Fi mockups with 2 main improvements based on design critiques with my mentor and peer feedback.

Reconsider “Swipeable” items

I thought making items appear in a list swipeable would be useful. But I found a usability issue when I used another app with similar features.

Let users decide how to VIEW recipes

… 🌟 the style guide

 

TESTING + IMPROVEMENT

Does the solution meet my users' needs?

Based on various feedback from 2 rounds of usability testing, I continually iterated my design with 2 major improvements:

2

ROUNDS OF
USABILITY TESTING

10

MODERATE TESTS
CONDUCTED

98%

INCREASED IN
COMPLETION RATE

01 Guided Onboarding Experience

02 Some icons and buttons are unclear

 

The FINAL Product

Onboarding

When faced with new recipes, we have no idea where to start without guidance. This is how users feel when they open the app for the first time. So with the onboarding, users are guided along the way with some hand-holding.

Collect

Never lose recipes again!
Users can add all the recipes they like from anywhere by link, typing, or snap & scan.

Search & Customize

  • Users can use searching by Name or Filter

  • Easily change servings or units when users want

  • Look for alternatives to the ingredients when users want to adjust the recipes

What I learned

This was my first UI/UX project. More than anything else, it has been an incredible experience to have been through an entire end-to-end UX process so that I can see what it's like from the inside out. Here are some key things I learned:

  1. Advocating for the end-user: It was great to use the users' feedback, and I learned how vital it is to always advocate for end-users. I was reminded that my assumptions are not always right, and I'm not designing for myself but for others.

  2. Balance usability and aesthetic appeal in my design: Sometimes, I made mistakes when I designed screens that looked cool but did not function properly. However, learning how to pivot is always exciting.

✨ Thank you for reading ✨

More projects:

Moni Mobile App

GramCity Design Sprint