User experience student design project
Inspired Pantry
In October I had the pleasure of completing a short course in User Experience Design at Academy Xi. We learned and practiced UX tools and techniques in this course 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.
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 the competitor analysis stage 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 to focus on the ‘main feature’: the recipe finder by available ingredients.
User journey mapping for paper prototype
MVP Mapping
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.
User journey mapping for Prototype 2
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. In the next round of prototyping, I doubt whether the features explored so far will resonate with users and be in demand. I want to explore two ‘future features’ shown in purple below which may prove to be apps in their own right.
2024 update
With the advent of AI, some of the core features of this app can be conducted with ChatGPT making the app unviable.
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.
Community Garden feature mapping
Optical character recognition
A feature that enables users to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to add ingredients from photographed recipes to add them to a shopping list quickly. Users can deselect ingredients they don’t need and share the shopping list with people outside the app conducting a grocery shop.