Tastest
A mobile app for college students to explore home cooking through community support and engagement.
PROBLEM
Transitioning into adulthood …
Entering college, most freshmen just begin to explore the world of independence and self sustainability. During this stage, they typically depend on their campus meal plan, takeout food, or a good old cup of ramen 🍜 for their daily meals. Struggles include wasting money or food resources while they were just trying to save time and energy.
The given design prompt was to design a mobile app to solve a problem of our choice regarding a college students’ wellbeing. I wanted to explore ways that could be beneficial to young adults that are just beginning to learn how to manage their own nourishment.
OPPORTUNITY
How might we make the process of learning food management and creation more convenient, feasible, and exciting?
My Approach.
I followed a thorough design process in order to make design decisions and evaluate them.
01. RESEARCH
What’s currently out there?
I looked into some existing applications that related to the problem scope that I wanted to address, which included CookList, Grocery, Yummly, and Tasty. After identifying the key features of each application, I found that they were directed more towards people who might have access to kitchen tools and food resources.
MARKET RESEARCH
More than keeping track of groceries and finding extensive recipes, my goal was to ideate features that encourage students and newly budding adults to engage in improving their food management and creation process.
INTERVIEWS (6)
Friendly interrogations conversations.
I had 6 interviews with current college students with an age range of 18-25. From these conversations, I was able to learn more about their motivations, discouragements, and areas of opportunity.
02. SYNTHESIS
1. Students are less inclined to cook at home if it takes too much time and effort.
Online recipes are complicated with ingredients and steps to navigate that students might not always have the time for. In order to save their time and effort while they’re also managing classes, extracurriculars, etc, students are found to be sacrificing money and food by ordering takeout or neglecting leftover/expiring ingredients.
KEY INSIGHTS
Through these insights, I consolidated my findings into two user personas. Both represent different archetypes of college students, from which I decided to focus the ideation process on Vanessa, who encompasses a group of students that do not have a campus meal plan to rely on and are exploring their own methods of self sufficiency.
2. A large barrier in the process is managing expiring ingredients.
As a college student, grocery shopping takes valuable time and energy. This causes students to try to buy enough groceries to last weeks at a time. Overbuying eventually leads to leftover, expiring ingredients that students struggle to use.
3. Students typically shared a kitchen/fridge with other students.
Sharing pantry space, a fridge, or even a minifridge limits a student’s variety and amount of ingredients that they can keep at a time. Optimizing storage space is key to maintaining a healthy home cooking routine in college housing.
USER PERSONAS
Who am I designing for?
03. IDEATION
Converging Thoughts.
After listing the pros and cons for a variety of feature solutions, I decided to focus on a theme of learning with a community, an attribute that seemed to also be the most lacking out of other competitor applications.
AFFINITY DIAGRAMMING
User Flows.
Converging from my feature ideations, I constructed a flow of the application that highlights (1) discovering recipes that other students also follow, (2) keeping track of your food & collaborating with housemates, (3) sharing recipes and ingredients with friends, (4) having a record of favorited & try later recipes.
SITE MAPPING
04. PROTOTYPING
Low-Fi to Mid-Fi.
Building off of the previously constructed flows, I sketched out feature ideas and converted them into wireframes to visualize the flow components. Shown below are bits of my wireframing process!
SKETCHES & WIREFRAMING
High-Fidelity Designs
After critiquing mid fidelity iterations, I created an interactable prototype on Figma with high fidelity screens.
05. USER TESTING
Goals, Metrics, & Improvements.
In order to understand how my designs may perform, I tested with 4 of my interviewees using my prototyped designs. With the goal of creating an engaging space for students to explore developing their own home cooking routine and food management process, I measured task completion, satisfaction rate, and qualitative feedback.
I found that users…
would like the option to search & filter for recipes that included their ingredients rather than only having recommendations
wanted the ability to be quicker in achieving their goals = less scrolling or clicking to do main tasks (e.g. filter selections, recommended recipes, organizing pantry)
INTERACTIVE PROTOTYPE
Home Feed
Students can find new recipes that their peers also make, and filter their feed with ingredients currently in their pantry.
Paint Point Addressed → lack of resources for students to learn food management/creation that caters to their limited environment
The pantry page tracks at-home groceries/leftovers with users being able to add items quickly by taking photos/scanning receipts and organizing food based on where they’re stored.
Pain Point Addressed → difficulty keeping track of food at home while sharing storage/fridge space with roommates
Your Pantry
Through messaging, students can collaborate on recipes with friends to combine misc ingredients.
Pain Point Addressed → students avoided using leftover ingredients that they can’t make into a meal without having to get more groceries; ends up expiring and being thrown away
In-App Messaging
User Profile
The profile page stores the user’s favorited/saved-for-later recipes and has access to an overall view of connected friends/communities.
Pain Point Addressed → forgetfulness & indecisiveness with meal planning
A centralized space to learn recipes & practice daily food management.
FINAL CONCEPT
REFLECTION
💡 Takeaways
With Tastest being my first UX project and first time practicing design thinking, I learned so much going through the human-centered design process to create a product prototype. From the initial user research to the final prototyping, something I learned was how not every solution is a fitting solution. During the ideation portion of my process, I spent extra time trying to explore different solutions that I personally thought were really cool. I learned that it’s insightful to diverge when brainstorming, but I’m ultimately building a product for the target audience and not myself.
🔁 Future Iterations
Similar to all other social-based apps, the content posted by its users can set the tone for how the app is actually used along with possibly being a determining factor for continual traffic. In order for this app concept to work, more explorations are needed to see how the app would function in the hands of my users - college students.
Working with my interviewees for insights and feedback has been an amazing experience, being able to see how others would use my designs. For next steps, I would love to explore solutions for suggestions that came up during user testing, like being able to collaborate on created recipes or working with the visibility of other users’ pantries.