Methodology
The design process was guided by the needs of the user. My team began discovering these needs by conducting a series of interviews with food enthusiasts. Their needs were defined through synthesizing that data into actionable insights. From there, I ideated with my team on potential solutions, prototyped our ideas, and validated them by running them through rounds of usability tests.
Our goal was to learn how food-enthusiasts and amateur cooks connect with others through cooking and sharing recipes. We asked them questions such as how (or if) they connect with others through food during quarantine (or with long distance friends, etc).
Interviews
Discover
From these three themes, we distilled our key insights. We found that our users like to connect with each other by sharing their passion for cooking. They also want to share recipes they’ve enjoyed and are always looking for ways to improve their cooking skills.
Based on the data we uncovered from our user interviews, we learned that sharing cooking experiences with others brings joy to our target audience and allows them to connect emotionally with friends and family in our lives. However, aside from sharing recipes, there is no alternative for long distance friends.
Overview
Julienne is an IOS Mobile App that allows users to select recipes and cook them alongside each other simultaneously.
I worked as a UX researcher and designer alongside a small team to gain insights and design, prototype, and conduct usability tests.
My Role
Julienne
Mobile Product Design
Cooking alongside our friends and family is an essential, meaningful way we connect. It helps us develop new relationships and maintain the ones we have.
However, in times of social distancing, or when we live far apart from others, how do we craft these cooking experiences?
Julienne is an IOS mobile app that allows users to cook recipes alongside each other simultaneously, no matter where you are. With Julienne, users pick a recipe from a catalogue, cook it step by step with their friends, and help each other along the way.
DEFINE
After synthesizing our research, we created two personas to reflect our target audience’s goals, needs, and pain points. We referred back to these personas while ideating our product in order to maintain empathy for our target audience.
Persona
Joyce has recently moved from LA to NY. She loves hosting dinner parties and is always excited to learn new recipes and techniques — though she often finds herself googling complicated cooking terms.
James has a passion for cooking and loves to connect with people through a shared meal. He met Joyce in LA and is struggling to stay in touch with her now that she’s moved away.
We wanted our product to help these two foodie friends reconnect.
Journey Map
We created a user journey map to help visualize how Joyce might accomplish the task of cooking dinner. By mapping every step of her emotional experience we gained understanding of her behavior, needs, and pain points.
Our product would consolidate Joyce’s cooking experience into a positive, streamlined journey. We’d give Joyce an opportunity to foster the connection she has with her friend while helping her cook dinner in an exciting way.
Problem Statement
At this point of our process, we reevaluated our hypothesis and developed a problem statement. By applying our research to our assumptions, we found that our hypothesis was validated.
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Home cooks and food-enthusiasts stay connected to others through shared cooking experiences.
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Long distance friends and those social distancing are unable to cook alongside their friends and family and efficiently share recipes.
We began asking ourselves:
Cook recipes with friends in real time: We wanted to explore how users may cook the same recipes simultaneously. This became our primary feature that drove the development of our application.
Sharing: Adding to our primary concept, we wanted to incorporate some easy recipe searching and sharing to help users get their friends involved.
Learning: There is always room for improvement in cooking — and our research told us our users enjoy that challenge. What better way to learn a new recipe or new technique than to cook it alongside your friends?
These three features were the foundation for our product.
IDEATE & Prototype
Having a clear direction for our feature set, I conducted a design studio with my team to ideate on how the features could be incorporated into the app. We rapidly sketched ideas, discussed, and iterated on potential solutions.
Design Studio
Once a unified vision for the application had been designed, we created mid fidelity wireframes. Creating this quick, simple prototype allowed us to begin usability testing and get feed back from our users before incorporating more visual elements.
VALIDATE
To test the functionality of the prototype, we asked five participants who represents our target audience to participate in our first of two rounds of usability testing. We provided them a scenario and three tasks to complete. While doing so, we measured their timing, success rate, and difficulty level.
Usability Testing
Task # 1: Invite your friend, James, to cook a carrot cake together for Friday, July 10th at 3pm.
Task # 2: It is now 3 pm on Friday, July 10th. Start your scheduled event with James.
Task # 3: You’re cooking a carrot cake with James. Follow the steps and complete the recipe.
Usability Testing Results
Participants struggled task #1. Our success rate for this task was only 60%. Users were struggling to navigate the home screen in our mid fidelity prototype. There was a lack of definition between the sections of navigation. After a bit of reorganization, we ran the same test with the same tasks.
The results from the second round of testing validated the design choices, showing a significant improvement in average time as illustrated in the second scorecard deltas. The third task of following a recipe likely increased in time do to a brief tutorial we added to the recipe screens.
Deliver
The following image is a map of the high fidelity version of the application.
Moving forward, I would like to continue to iterating and testing the high fidelity design. The last round of usability tests provided a substantial amount of feedback enquiring of the possibility of the incorporation of video. Video would add another layer of interactivity that would be exciting to explore.
