Role - Product designer
Breif - To create a mobile app that allows users of all skill levels to browse a curated database of recipes and follow along with a video cooking class.
Challenge - having a continuosly growing catalogue of recipes it was important to be able to filter the recipes to cater for people with diferent dietary restrictions, food allergies and intollerences whilst also being able to filter by cooking ability.
Making sure that the instructional videos work seamlessly was a challenge with the potential for user internet performance issues. With this being the case, introducing a download area of the app where recipes and their accompanying videos can be stored for offline use offered a great solution whilst also improving performance, user engagement, accessibility and reducing users data costs.
Before we undertook any initial designs, we looked at what was currently available on the market, by conducting a competitive analysis of both direct and indirect competition we were able to identify areas where our design could stand out and offer a unique value proposition as well as identify pain points and usability issues that can be avoided.
Once we had analysed the competition, we had a good understanding of features and improvements we could offer that weren't currently available on the market. We initially began the design process with simple, hand drawn sketch wireframes to quickly get ideas down on paper. The best ideas from the sketch exercise were promoted on to digital wire frames to get a better understanding of how best to layout the different elements of each page.
With all the elements of the app laid out into an initial flow, we progressed on to create user personas to better understand the needs, goals and behaviours of our potential users. The personas help in the decision making process as it offers a framework that can be used to make sure the needs and goals of the user are kept at the forefront of every decision.
We subsequently used our personas as a basis to create user journey maps. The journey maps allowed us to identify pain points and look at areas to improve our product over current competition.
After reviewing the user journey maps to find themes and pain points, we were able to progress onto developing a lo-fi prototype that addressed all positive and negative aspects discovered.
The interactive prototype was then used as the basis to conduct an unmoderated usability study with a varied selection of candidates. Findings from the usability study were fistly recorded using spreadsheets and then sorted into a prioritised list of insights to be addressed when iterating the design.
With all the usability study data processed we had clear feedback that could be used to advance our design to a hi-fi prototype for further testing, before finalising the design.