Living thousands of miles away from my family and friends, and not being a good cook every time I need to do a facetime call with my mom to cook something. This motivated me to create a product that could help people to connect with others while having a communal cooking experience.
My role: UX Designer responsible for user research
Duration: 4 weeks
Team: Individual
User interviews, Persona, How might we activity, Ideation, Rapid Sketching, Wireframes, User testing, Iteration, Hight-fidelity designs
Interview, competitive analysis, persona, storyboarding, information architecture, wireframing, prototyping, usability testing
The experience of communal cooking and sharing food brings joy to the lives of home cooks and food enthusiasts. However, for those such as long-distance friends, the simple act of cooking dinner together or hosting a dinner party with friends is not an option.
As a result, amateur cooks and food-enthusiasts struggle to maintain relationships with others remotely.
Cookmate: A new social cooking app that brings family and friends together virtually and allows users to cook and connect with others simultaneously, no matter where they are. This app will allow users to browse recipes and get recommendations based on the selection, cook together with friends/family by creating a cooking event, and share cooking experience and food pictures with each other.
The homepage showcases recommendations and new food recipes. Users can view recipes according to their interests and filter search results for the recipes by selecting tags from popular tags or using the search bar. On the homepage, users can also see the upcoming cooking event which has already been scheduled.
Users can create a new cooking event using the event button from the main navigation. In just a few steps, users can create their own new cooking event, and send the invitation to other cook mates. The Cookmate app will also notify users of the newly created event. Users can also get the event invitation in the notification if some other people have created the event.
Users can virtually cook together with other cook mates to enjoy the experience of cooking together. Clicking on a start button will allow them to start cooking by connecting with cook mate through an audio call or video call. Users can see the progress of cooking through the progress bar along with other people. After completing the cooking, users can share experience of cooking to their friends and family.
I decided to follow IDEO’s Human-Centered Design and Lean UX Design Thinking process to make sure that my design decisions were supported by user research and feedback.
I conducted 5 interviews with amateur cooks and food enthusiasts to understand people’s daily cooking routines, their needs and frustrations, and how they connect with others through the activity of cooking. Through a synthesis, I was able to create a typical journey map of people’s cooking experience and extracted 3 main pain points of communal cooking. Meanwhile, I conducted a competitor analysis to determine what has been done and what needs to be done.
Based on our interview findings, we created personas that helped us gain a clear perspective of our target users and their goals and interests. Jenny is an adult who recently moved to a new city due to her work, and is looking for ways to connect with her friends through communal cooking.
I created a user journey map to help me visualize how Jenny might accomplish the task of cooking a meal and connecting with her friend, James. This involved mapping out every step of her emotional experience. Envisioning Jenny’s emotional journey helped me prioritize what problems to address.
After understanding the pain points faced by the users and crafting a design goal, I used the how might we activity to brainstorm some possible solutions which could solve the user’s pain points and frustrations.
I sketched out some ideas to solve the identified problems to visualize and brainstorm some of the features for our solution and map out the users journey.
I used paper wireframes to conduct user testings, a few insights that came out of these 5 people user testing were...
I refined my existing sketches to accommodate some new problems which I had identified.
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I design the scroll-up gesture to be familiar with touch-screen users but more intentionally as you will need 2 fingers.
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Scroll-down gesture has another challenge, it needs to be differentiated from the scroll-up and has to be clear in begin and end motion so the device can capture and register it.
Select with the curve finger as it’s a more natural transit from pointing gesture of scroll to holding gesture of select.
Considering the company’s personality, I started with having some adjective words in mind and chose the most representative colors, typeface, and icons to convey the feeling of Freshness, Accessible, and Friendly. Next, I worked on the design system where I collected all the reusable design components and assets. This design system helped me to achieve higher efficiency, consistency and scalability while designing the final prototype.
After I had the sketches and and the information architecture in my hand, I started to create high-fidelity versions of my designs.
1. Turn feedback into opportunities
Understanding how to analyze and user research data to put myself in the user's shoes. This let me validate or reject my own assumptions, formulate strong rationale for decisions, and turn feedback into opportunities.
2. Find and solve the fundamental issue, not the symptoms
Creating product design, it is easy to get into the pixels and details of what makes sense visually and unknowingly disregard user considerations. Hosting a user research sessions with our participants helped clarify the language I wanted to use to make it easily understandable with more seamless interactions.
3. You are not the user
Do not take it for granted that others think or interact the same way you do. You are not the user, the only way to validate your assumptions is to do the test with real users iteratively.
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