Background
The research shown below was conducted during a UX/UI design course while attending CUNY's communication design program. Given the choice of 3 possible apps to develop I chose to work on a recipe app(other options included Travel, and Entertainment), as I believe there is still much to be done within that space in regards to educating people on how to cook.
Process
My team's original hypothesis was "How might we help people meal plan?" To figure this out we brainstormed features which would be crucial to finding and cooking recipes. One of our goals was to foster a community that likes to create share and try one another's recipes, as well as one that educates inexperienced people looking to begin cooking. We then sorted our ideas into a MoSCoW map.
Next, we placed the features we brainstormed onto an impact vs effort matrix. This helped us determine which features were essential and light weight to design.
While we had a ton of great ideas UX Design is not about what the developers want, it's about what the users need. To figure this out we created a discussion guide which we utilized in interviews with potential users.
The goal of this discussion guide was to get users to speak openly about their current processes. Where are they finding recipes, how are they managing their meal planning were our top priorities. Utilizing open ended questioning we sought to find the pain points, and desires of our audience. After our interviews we created an empathy map.
We then loaded our empathy map with feedback from our potential users.
These findings allowed us to create a journey map which imagined the process of our user struggling to decide what to cook even with a refrigerator full of groceries. But, who is our user?
Meet Apple
(Persona designed by me)
After synthesizing our data we found that people don't actually want to meal plan. People looking for recipes to cook, are not people who meal plan. Two things potential users said to us were "Meal planning kills spontaneity" and "I want to be able to find tasty recipes quickly."
A Change of Direction
It's after synthesizing all of this data that we found out that our core users don't care about meal planning. They want to easily find recipes without all of the fluff. We asked ourselves "How might we make it easy and quick for people to prepare a meal?"
Introducing Spatula
Spatula's core functionality is to allow users to select ingredients they have on hand across several categories (meat, vegetables etc.) and return recipes which utilize those ingredients.
Try It Out!