My Role
UX Designer
Team
1 Project Manager
3 Designers
My Contributions
User Research
Visual Design
Logo
Prototyping
Usability Testing
UX Writing
Ideation
Wireframing
Tools
Miro
Figma
Invision
Google Drive
Trello
Duration
4 Weeks
Overview
Timeline
For my final group project during my UX Bootcamp experience, I was paired up with 3 other designers tasked with conceptualizing and designing a mobile app.
This project took place over the course of 4 weeks with the culmination of a presentation to the rest of the class on our invention, challenges, design, and next steps.
Outcome
An app that can best be described as a recipe generator meets Buzzfeed quiz, Simpleat asks you simple questions about what ingredients you currently have, assumes you have some basics, and then provides you with a range of things you can make based on what you input. In under 2 minutes, you can take those random ingredients in your fridge and pantry and create a meal you didn’t even know you had.
Project Preview
Challenge
Food Waste in the United States
The solution to our problem was medically based and we had very slim to non-existent medical device knowledge outside of anecdotal experience. We found it difficult to get in touch with the right engineers and doctors. We utilized extensive desk research and diary studies to gather all the information we could before proceeding
Working as a team for the first time.
For the past 10 years, I've worked independently as a freelancer, so for me, working with a team on a creative endeavor was a first for me in a long time. Part of the challenge for me
User Research
7 - One on One Interviews
72 - Survey Responses
Goal:
Gather an understanding of users’ meal planning processes. This includes uncovering their dinner habits, understanding their current groccery shopping routine, and determining how external circumstances affect they dinner on average.
What we learned:
People with busy schedules need simplified and convenient ways to plan meals because they are too drained by the end of the day to effectively plan and cook dinner, which leads to frustration and a cycle of disappointment.
Affinity Diagram
User Persona
Sketching
Due to limited time, we skipped paper sketching and went straight to lo-fi prototyping. If we would have had more time, I believe paper prototyping would have allowed us to save time iterating the overall design and might have come up with a better flow. I stand behind the idea of getting lots of ideas out on paper first as a part of the creative process as it allows me to be less precious and kill off bad ideas easier. Below are some of the initial ideas we came up with.
Testing and Iteration
Generation Page
Testing our lo-fi prototype left us with some takeaways that we implemented in our hi-fi.
We found that overall, the design of our site made sense to users. The concept was easy to grasp but some buttons were hard for them to click. We bumped up the size of our directional buttons underneath the food options. "Skip" was replaced by "Previous" and we removed the "Back Button" Above.
We also add a Nav bar at the bottom to aid in site accessibility and we removed the home button in the top right of the original concept.
Recipe Instruction Page
Feedback from the recipe page showed us that the layout made sense to the user. As above, we decided to add a Navbar to help users get around the site better and added the ability to swipe out of the recipe page and back to the recipe list of options. We found that movie the "Save" icon lower made more sense to the user and was easy to access upon follow-up testing.
Final Design and Prototype
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Takeaways
Lessons Learned
I learned a lot, and I mean lot, from this first collaborative group project. I really took away the power of a design + component library for consistency and communication in figma. We didn't have one for this project and, looking back, it clearly made things much harder than they needed to be.
Another thing we all learned as a group was the power of knowing your timeline and the scope of the project. During the first week, we took way too big of a bite and it slowed us down later as we were forced to scale back and take a more manageable look at things. Theres a real power in doing one thing and doing it well. You can always iterate and add more later once you lay a solid foundation and establish a direction.
Next Steps
Moving forward, with more and time, we’d like to add a feature that allows users to filter recipes based on dietary restrictions and/or preferences and some more polished design elements.
We’d also like to add a new page in the questionnaire allowing Sam to tell us what cooking methods they have available to them. For example If the user was someone who lived in a small apartment unit with no oven, those meals will be filtered out.