In October I had the pleasure of completing a short course in User Experience Design at Academy Xi. In this course, we learned and practiced UX tools and techniques on a personal project.
This case study follows the journey of exploring my Inspired pantry App idea.

Research

One on one interviews and a short survey were conducted to try and discover people’s cooking and food waste habits across various household types.

Problem Statement

When grocery supplies are running low in a household, people who cook start to find it hard to be inspired to prepare a meal using the ingredients they have. Uneaten food then may go to waste.

Insights

Some cook food in bulk so they reduce time in the kitchen

Families tend to be more likely to prepare more than one meal at a time.

21% occasionally use meal delivery services such as Hello Fresh, Marley Spoon, Fresh Fit Food.

Most conduct a general grocery shop with a rough idea of meals in mind.

As the grocery week progresses, people find it harder to decide what to cook and basket shop for meal missing ingredients, order takeaway or eat out until they decide to shop again.

Reducing food waste is highly important to 42% of people

User journey mapping for Paper prototype

Mobile App Vision

Develop a mobile app that helps users reduce food waste by inspiring users to be more creative in the kitchen with their current ingredients and their next grocery shop.

Competitor ANALYSIS

When a competitor analysis was conducted, I found that Yummly had a fantastic onboarding process to discover a user’s eating habits. I skipped mapping and prototyping that process instead to focus on the ‘main feature’: the recipe finder by available ingredients.

Prototype 2

Where the paper prototype first explored the basic features, prototype 2 went into further detail testing the main features and navigation.

When user testing was conducted, I became aware of redundancies and some language inconsistencies. I had a generic menu button in the top right, however I concluded that It was too vague after user testing. This was changed to a user profile button that would have the recipe and dietary preferences which would initially beset by an onboarding process when the app is first opened up.

Next steps - Successful app or is it a dud?

When conducting a competitor analysis, similar apps in the marketplace have similar functionality to a recipe finder by ingredients feature so in the next round of prototyping, I have doubts about whether the features explored so far will resonate with users and be in demand. I want to explore are two ‘future features’ shown in purple below which may prove to be apps in their own right.

Unexplored Features

Community garden

This feature would be a marketplace for ingredients where participants can contribute to a decentralised community garden by lending unwanted food and ingredients to reduce food waste and increase social cohesion and connectivity in the local neighbourhood.

I hypothesize that this feature would need a certain saturation of usage for users to bother with it. It could be practical in already close communities or high-density areas.

Optical character recognition

A feature that enables users to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to add ingredients from photographed recipes in order to quickly add them to a shopping list. Users can deselect ingredients they don’t need and also share the shopping list with externally to people conducting a grocery shop.

Stock photos used by You X Ventures on Unsplash,