Overview
Problem Statement: “What do you want to eat?”
One of the main reasons this question can be so stressful is due to the amount of time people have available to cook their meals. Millennials often have many nutritional goals, but are too busy to cook the meals their bodies need or simply don’t even have enough time to figure out what foods they need to eat in general in order to achieve those goals.
Solution Overview
Chef’s Kiss is a mobile app designed as a part of my initial Capstone project to decrease the decision time millennials use when choosing meals by giving them personalized recipes. This app eliminates the stress and pressure of making a decision each day and gives users all the information they need in one clean, simple and straightforward location.
Background
Every day, like clockwork, people have to choose what to eat. When trying to tackle this problem, I first wanted to better define the problem I was trying to solve. I started by conducting secondary research to see what additional information I could find about this issue.
The reason why deciding what to eat can feel so overwhelming at times is due to “choice overload”. According to a study published in Nature Human Behavior, choice overload is defined as a scenario where your brain is faced with an overwhelming amount of options, causing your brain to have difficulties making a decision.
During this research, I also learned that millennials are the most impacted by meal decision fatigue. A variety of factors can influence millennial’s food decisions, such as:
Choice Overload
Time/Convenience
Budget
Health Preferences
Cravings
Company while dining
User Research
Once prepared with this background information, it was time to conduct some research of my own to see what other information I could uncover about the problem. I sent out a screener survey to identify which users would be ideal candidates to conduct user interviews.
User Interviews
The user interviews were really insightful for me and helpful in knowing what frustrations users had with the current food decision process. 74% identified time/convenience as one of the main factors that influenced their food decisions and over 50% described the process of choosing dinner as frustrating or overwhelming.
A few of the user quotes from interviews can be seen here:
“There are so many different things you can eat and sometimes you’re in the mood for 5 things but you should only eat one of those things”
“Choosing dinner feels like a chore.”
“Poor food planning can have negative impacts on other areas of my life.”
“I would like to put on a little more muscle but I don’t always have the time to eat the way that I should.”
“We try to plan our meals but sometimes we just eat whatever our 2 year old son will eat.. And his preferences are always changing.”
Research Synthesis
After conducting user interviews, I took my notes and some of the quotes from each of my user interviews to complete an affinity mapping exercise. This exercise allowed me to identify the key themes from the user research.
Time/Energy is the biggest factor that influences food decisions.
Users want new convenient food options.
Users want to cook with ingredients/nutrition they can control.
Users go to takeout as a last resort.
Users do not enjoy the process of choosing foods.
Many factors can influence a user’s food decision and these factors are different for each user.
Key Themes:
Personas
The following 3 personas were developed based on characteristics of the interviewees and quotes from my user interviews to get a good idea of the various types of potential users. These personas were continually referenced throughout the design process to ensure all users would benefit from this solution.
Initial Concept & Early Design
When thinking about what solution would work best for the millennial population, I decided to design a mobile app. Millennials are very tech savvy and are always on the go, making a mobile app much more useful to this population than a desktop site would be.
Sketches
One of the main user quotes that stuck with me was, “Choosing dinner feels like a chore.” This made me wonder how to make the process more fun and enjoyable. Many users mentioned they liked to listen to music, so the initial app design was based on popular music streaming services.
Similar to how popular music streaming services work, the initial designs of the app focused on allowing users to save and skip recipes whenever they felt was necessary.
Popular music streaming services take some time to get to know their users, but having a food preferences quiz in the beginning of the app would allow users to input their base food preferences on Day One.
These preferences would continue to get better as the app learned more about the user, allowing them to have ultimate control over what foods they consumed.
Based on the home screen for popular music streaming apps, users would be able to:
Get new recommended recipes based on their favorites
See what recipes are currently popular, or “trending”
Browse different meal categories
Minimum Viable Product
In order to determine what the minimum viable product should be, I thought back to the user interviews and the main pain points users were having with their current food decision process and how to address those.
Users wanted to have control over their meals, so I included the ability to define their food preferences in the MVP.
Users like to cook but often don’t know what to cook, so I added their weekly meals to the home screen so it would be the first recipes they saw.
Users don’t always have a lot of extra time, so the recipe cards are straightforward and to the point.
The success of users’ weekly meals depends on the success of their shopping trip, so I included a Shopping List feature that has all the necessary ingredients for the week in one place.
User Flows
In order for all these features to provide the best possible user experience, all screens would have to flow together in a way that was simple and intuitive for the user as well. Three main red routes were developed for this app based on the actions all users would have to perform on the app:
The initial app setup flow
2. Selecting a recipe
3. Checking the shopping list
Home Screen Redesign
Once the MVP was defined and the user flows determined, I conducted usability tests with the sketches to see what screens worked and which ones needed to be improved.
During this usability testing, I discovered that instead of making the process of selecting dinner easier and more enjoyable, this home screen design enhanced users’ feeling of “choice overload”. This was the opposite of what this app was supposed to do.
As a result of this testing, the home screen was updated to only shows the user’s personalized meals and gives them the option to explore all meals or see what recipes may be trending.
Chef’s Kiss Vision
After the user flows and wireframes were complete, it was time to give this app a name and a personality of its own. And thus Chef’s Kiss was born.
In order to enhance the desirability of the food on the app without being distracting, I chose to use colors that could be found in the food pyramid: green, orange, yellow and some red if necessary.
Only high quality food images were used when designing the app to help increase desirability as well.
High Fidelity Prototype
The Chef’s Kiss vision was combined with the wireframes to create a high fidelity prototype to conduct usability tests. When creating these high fidelity screens, I had to keep reminding myself that less is more. Less clutter, less font styles, less distractions.
Outside of the page titles, there was only one font style used to ensure there was a cohesive feel to every part of the app. The minimum font size on any screen is 16px to help with readability for users.
While creating the high fidelity mockups, I conducted an accessibility audit to ensure the app was readable and enjoyable for all users. As a result of this, the specific shades of green and orange were changed to increase accessibility for all users.
All screens use only 3 colors: green and white as the base and orange as the pop color to help promote the bright, happy feeling while not being too distracting.
Usability Tests
For the usability tests, I conducted two rounds in person with 5 unique individuals each time. All individuals fell into the target millennial demographic.
User Testing
Complete the set up quiz
View meals for the week
Determine what ingredients are needed from the grocery store
Browse new recipes and add one to week
Tasks that were asked:
User Feedback
Overall, users enjoyed the experience of using the app! They thought the app was easy, simple and fun to use but also highlight a few areas for improvement:
Difficulty with the slider functionality
This was the only non-multiple choice question so users tended to slow down once they got to this screen.
Users unable to update meal preferences
Not a task that was asked but luckily one participant pointed it out!
Replacing a meal was not straightforward
Users preferred having multiple views for their shopping cart
Design Updates
Updated the slider to multi-choice options.
Added the option to update food preferences to the settings page.
Enhanced the “Replace Meal” CTA.
Added multiple view options for the shopping cart
Future Enhancements
If time allowed, the next steps would include:
Iterating on the mockups based on feedback from Round 2 of Usability Tests and conducting another round of usability tests
Conducting A/B testing with new group to see which screen layout (screen from Round One vs. screen from Round Two) provides a better user experience
Consulting with developers to determine the feasibility of certain design decisions (i.e., free text inputs on the Preferences Quiz vs. pre-defined multiple choice answers, etc.)
Conclusions
While this app never made it to production, the success of this app would have been measured by the number of users who downloaded the app and the duration of time the user kept the app open. The longer they used the app, the more personalized it would become. Also, if they chose to keep the app downloaded, this means that they found some value in using the app.
I would also want to conduct user interviews after a month of use to see if they still faced the same issues with choosing meals for dinner or if using the Chef’s Kiss app helped solve their food decision problems.