Through the Advanced UX course at SVA, my team applied an accelerated UX design process to problems people experience when cooking a meal. In this project, we focused on the problem space of the “cooking” part of one’s cooking journey and sought to make an efficient cooking process. We improved usability of the app by testing our prototypes and suggested an audio-based recipe feature on the NYT Cooking app as the solution.
5 weeks (Jan-Feb 2022)
· Conducted user research for target group
· Ideated ideas and did concept development
· Designed user flows, UX UI design on audio-based recipe part
· Iterated final design by user testing
April Chien(Designer)
Ted Lee(Designer)
Yi Jie(Designer)
Suri Namkoung(Designer)
Matt Raw(VP, Product Design Culture & Operations at The New York Times)
The advisor Matt of this course gave each team different areas of problem space from preparing to cooking a meal. In this project, we focused on the problem space of the “cooking” part of one’s cooking journey and sought to make an efficient cooking process.
· How young professionals view the process of cooking
· What they do regularly while cooking
· What cooking tools or habits do they have
· Who are they cooking for
1. Affinity mapping
We collected all the answers of the questions and categorized it based on overlapped behaviors, motivation, feelings, priorities, and etc.
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2. Finalize How Might We question
We reframed our answers to why / what’s stopping us as new HMW’s and pivoted on the most promising of the new HMW’s and pushed for specificity.
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Often doesn’t have enough time to cook
Some recipes take a longer time to understand and follow
Recipes don’t always have photos or illustrations to show
Hard to follow recipes because you often don’t know what to do next
Doesn’t know which ingredients are essential or not
Difficult to scroll device when while cooking
Cooking requires mutitasking and can be hard to read while chopping, boiling or frying. The audio feature will help play instructions for each step. Users can pause or skip sections at anytime while cooking.
Recipes are often complex and hard to get through even if the act of cooking is enjoyable. Image-based content can make it more digestable. This will not only make cooking enjoyable but also help save time.
People often don’t have an ingredient and don’t know what to substitute it with. It’s also hard for users to differentiate between essential versus nice-to-have ingredients. This section of the app provides people with a list of substitutes available for ingredients in a given recipe.
Users often waste time while waiting for certain cooking tasks to occur (like boiling pasta) so this view shows them what activities in the next step they can be working on in the meantime.
User testing scenario 1 - ingredients / 2 - start cooking / 3 - play audio / 4 - Next step
“I thought you had some really interesting explorations around the format of recipes. The initial ideas slide shows a bunch of potentially promising ideas. What’s smart about this is that you recognized that so many cooking apps and websites are still built around the traditional text-based recipe content type.”
I enjoyed discussion different ideas from diverse perspectives with my team which eventually allowed us to develop unique design solutions for NTY Cooking app. I am intrigued by how collaboration shapes the direction of the design. As a result, I would like to grow as a designer by learning more about collaborative skills.
Besides data analysis and rationale, UX design requires intuition to check our hypothesis efficiently. We must select some appropriate assumptions among many ideas in a short time. whether this feature or layout might be helpful for users or not is naturally guided by users and usability testing provided rich insights that I never thought of.
Prototyping a voice-driven way for users to interact with recipes could yield really valuable insights, especially in an environment where they may be co-cooking with flatmates.
Through the user testing, we decided to abandon that particular problem, but it will be better for us to free up your time to just focus on making co-cooking with flatmates easier and more fun, with new recipe UX at the center.
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