F r i d g y
Role: Creative Director, UX Designer, Visual Designer.
Concept: A mobile app that helps users reduce food waste and cook easy and fast delicious recipes at home.
Process: After interviewing 8 potential users and conducting exhaustive user research, I presented 3 different personas to define my target audience. Then, I worked on a B&W prototype and tested it with different users. After various iterations, I delivered a full-colour prototype ready to be coded in the next development stage.
Concept: A mobile app that helps users reduce food waste and cook easy and fast delicious recipes at home.
Process: After interviewing 8 potential users and conducting exhaustive user research, I presented 3 different personas to define my target audience. Then, I worked on a B&W prototype and tested it with different users. After various iterations, I delivered a full-colour prototype ready to be coded in the next development stage.
Title: Fridgy
Year: 2020
Tags: Web, mobile app, UX design, UI design, Branding, Logo design
Home banner picture created by Michelle Kondrich
Year: 2020
Tags: Web, mobile app, UX design, UI design, Branding, Logo design
Home banner picture created by Michelle Kondrich
value proposition
A mobile app that helps users to reduce food waste and cook easy and fast delicious recipes at home.
how might we statement
How might We provide an app that helps me to use the ingredients I already have at home and cook varied different dishes everyday?
potential userS
• People concerned about food waste.
• Individuals who want to cook by themselves different food everyday with what is available at home.
• Individuals who want to cook by themselves different food everyday with what is available at home.
questions to consider
What are their goals to use the app?
How can I make an effective shopping list that considers the ingredients I need and the already stored food?
How can they eliminate food waste?
How can I get proud of my cooking skills without wasting hours of time?
How can I make an effective shopping list that considers the ingredients I need and the already stored food?
How can they eliminate food waste?
How can I get proud of my cooking skills without wasting hours of time?
current assumptions
• All users needs to organize their fridge.
• Everyone likes to cook at home.
• Each person cares about food waste.
• Everyone likes to cook at home.
• Each person cares about food waste.
outcome
“Use the ingredients I have in my fridge to prepare new recipes, get inspired at cooking and find a solution to store just the food I am going to eat.”
user research & interviews
I conducted an extensive user research based on one-on-one interviews with potential users. The goal was to find their frustrations and motivations in the kitchen by stimulating relax conversations. I placed my questions in a natural order of actions, from the moment users decided to buy groceries until the after meal time. All the topics were: grocery shopping, food storing, cooking, eating and after-meal.
To be able to compare responses, I wrote a questionary and try to repeat the same questions in the same order, so I can establish patterns and find common problems. All the interviews were recorded in video to do the posterior analysis of the words, gestures, expressions, etc.
Finally, I completed my research finding some stats and articles about diet habits and food waste in North America. For both User Research tasks, interviews and insightful texts, I consider the following objectives, the problems and hypotheses.
objectives
1. Analyze the key household family demographic attributes.
2. Understand user’s motivations, goals and behaviours.
3. Find users' pain-points and frustrations.
4. Build up an Insight Statement.
2. Understand user’s motivations, goals and behaviours.
3. Find users' pain-points and frustrations.
4. Build up an Insight Statement.
problems to consider
Who cooks at home and who does the grocery shopping?
What cooking techniques do users specifically use?
How do they do to prepare food? What food organization system do they use?
When do most people prepare meals? When do most people go grocery shopping?
Why?
How do users reach their goals?
What actions do they take?
What cooking techniques do users specifically use?
How do they do to prepare food? What food organization system do they use?
When do most people prepare meals? When do most people go grocery shopping?
Why?
How do users reach their goals?
What actions do they take?
Hypotheses
Design the ideal Cooking at Home app
• We believe in a mobile app that helps young families to organize their groceries, cook easy and fast delicious recipes at home, reducing time and food waste without compromising quality. We will know this is true when we see the increment in the number of users and the high-score reviews at our website.
• Make an app that makes life easy for meal preparation: more organized, effective and reduces time preparing without compromising quality.
• We believe in a mobile app that helps young families to organize their groceries, cook easy and fast delicious recipes at home, reducing time and food waste without compromising quality. We will know this is true when we see the increment in the number of users and the high-score reviews at our website.
• Make an app that makes life easy for meal preparation: more organized, effective and reduces time preparing without compromising quality.
findings & insights
After the interview sessions, I grouped the users' responses in three categories: pain points, behaviours and motivations. This technique allowed me to narrow down the amount of information, establish relationships between responses and select the best findings from each conversation. Then, I addressed each finding with a possible insight, a solution provided by the app. This is what I found:
1. Limited time for cooking. → Having an app to help users to cook healthy food with fast and easy-to-make recipes (30 min max).
2. Forgetfulness. → You will receive periodic reminders about the available ingredients close to expiry date to avoid food waste.
3. Poor diet habits. → Fridgy will help users with easy-to-prepare recipes to make a variety of dishes and enrich their diet. Each recipe will contain information about calories and form your profile section you can control the level of calories you have consumed in the day and the variety of food you have ingested during the week.
4. Demotivated in the kitchen. → This app gamifies your cooking time and transforms your experience at the kitchen into a more enjoyable activity, having the possibility to win rewards for your recent learned skills. It will also record your "caloric mistakes" and help you to improve your diet.
5. Recycling tips and reuse of leftovers. → Fridgy will show you some tricks to make a good use of your leftovers after and give you tips to keep your food-waste levels close to zero.
6. Share & Inspire. → After cooking a recipe, you will have the chance to share your dish and provide helpful tips from your own experience, so you will be inspired and inspire others.
How is Fridgy human-centered?
Insights from my user research revealed that people are not aware of the amount of processed food we ingest everyday, but they try to find ways to improve their diet habits and show an inclination to reduce their ecological footprint: by recycling more, decrease the production of unnecessary waste and change their grocery shopping item selection.
Fridgy caters to these human needs and desires by increasing awareness of the food we consumed. Food is one of the most singularly important factors in overall health. I believe the food we eat literally becomes who we are, and influences our physical, mental and even emotional well-being. By recording the ingredients and offer a rich variety of healthy recipes users can cook by themselves we are improving the quality of life and, at the same time, make users think more about the environmental impact of producing waste.
Finally, users can also communicate their own cooking creations with the community and could potentially add another depth in how people archive and consume their experiences.
Ideation & Sketching
Taking in account all the insights, complex site-map was elaborated to define the main structure of the app. This a starting point to cover all the different sections and possible user paths in the app.
I designed 2 main tasks to achieve the main goals. I did a simple user tests with 3 participants to see if they can complete and move smoothly along the user paths correctly from the beginning to the end.
task 1: Launch the app & register one grocery
1. Open the app and launch it
2. Welcome Page
3. Quick Tour guide to the app
4. Create a new account and sign in
5. From the home page, record your groceries into the app
6. Inside each grocery screen, set up the quantities and the expiry date
1. Open the app and launch it
2. Welcome Page
3. Quick Tour guide to the app
4. Create a new account and sign in
5. From the home page, record your groceries into the app
6. Inside each grocery screen, set up the quantities and the expiry date
task 2: Cook a recipe & share a pic of your dish
7. Go to “Recipes” and select an ingredient
8. Choose one of the available recipes from the ingredient screen
9. Inside the recipe screen, make last selections (servings and ingredients)
10. You are ready to cook: follow the steps one by one
11. Take a picture of your dish and share it with the community
12. Rate the recipe and grab your skill points
8. Choose one of the available recipes from the ingredient screen
9. Inside the recipe screen, make last selections (servings and ingredients)
10. You are ready to cook: follow the steps one by one
11. Take a picture of your dish and share it with the community
12. Rate the recipe and grab your skill points
UX path feedback
Before working on a B&W prototype I received the following feedback from the test participants. Some of them are comments directly taken from the interview recordings, others come from my observations during/after the interview:
1. Not enough information. → Sometimes users don’t know how to click because there is no
wording associate to the call-to-action-elements.
wording associate to the call-to-action-elements.
2. Review the UX path sequence structure. → The User is following a linear sequence that is too rigid to allow users move freely in the app. Not always users will follow the suggested path. Considering all the decisions users can take to perform a task, the sequence structure should offer a variety of different paths to reach the same goal in different ways.
3. Create a Home Page. → A main page is essential to establish a starting point that connects all the sections and to offer a place where users can also come back to start a new action. It will also be a good opportunity to showcase on front new recipes, cooking tips and recent gained rewards.
4. Find an easy way to record a grocery. → It is not intuitive why users need to record their groceries first and how it will help them to reduce food-waste by using the app.
5. Consisting wording and review the keywords. → Name consistently the all the items and repeat keywords along the UX path to help users to create a clear mind map and make the app more intuitive.
6. Separate Recipes and Groceries sections. → Create a section that contains all the Recipes, totally separated from the Groceries section. The two tasks, input new grocery items and cooking a dish, can be no-consecutive actions, so a better separation will help users to understand that both tasks are totally different processes. After a thorough research and to avoid confusion, I will use the word "groceries" just for the stored items and the word "ingredients" to name the components of a recipe.
WIREFRAME SketcheS
After defining better the path, I went deeper in the layouts and defining the section pages, especially focused on the grocery section and the recipe ones, the two sections that are defining the two main tasks that I am going to implement into my prototype.
