Case Study that landed me in a full-time UI/UX designer role
By: Rohit Krishna
Tags: Product Designer, Intern, Case Study, Ui Ux Design, First Job

illustration by Jiaxing

Before I dive into the case study, I will introduce myself in brief. I’m an engineering graduate obsessed with graphics design and animations. After I joined college, I realized that design is my passion, and it’s not too late for me to start. While I was in 3rd year of engineering, I started doing freelancing UI/UX design and luckily got a couple of projects to work on and showcase in my portfolio. After my graduation, I started applying for product design and UX design roles, and finally, My portfolio was shortlisted for a promising design agency. They gave me a PRD and asked to finish it by eight days. They will select me solely depending on the final case study I submitted. So I thoroughly went through that PRD several times and decided to begin my battle.

Introduction

‘Kalavara’ (means kitchen) is an app that I had in my mind for a long time. But none had approached me for the same, nor did I have time to give flesh and bone to this concept. So when I received a challenge to make an app that will be useful in day to day life and help you to solve a real-life problem, I felt like it’s time to give life to my idea. ‘Kalavara’ is a cooking assistant rather than an old-style recipe app, where the user will be able to find dishes that can be made from available ingredients. So you don’t have to waste your money on buying extra ingredients or spending time learning something that you will never make in real-life.

Overview

According to a 2018 survey conducted by Statista, every single day, around 6,140 apps are releasing worldwide. So coming up with a new idea is something impossible now, because someone has already implemented this idea or working on it right now. There are popular apps present in the play store that will search for meals by selecting available ingredients. For most of them, this is an extra feature, but my focus is to come up with an app that primarily focuses on this feature. Another concern while designing the app is to design it in such a way that it should be useful for all age groups.

Interview

As an initial phase, I interviewed three individuals who are extremely different in all aspects, such as profession, age, and gender. This interview was to understand their problems and how I can fix their problems through this app. One of the interviewees was a 21-year-old engineering undergraduate. He is a day scholar and doesn’t know much about cooking. I asked a few general questions to understand whether he is interested in cooking. What are the factors that stop him from cooking his favorite dishes? And also, I asked a few scenarios where he is forced to cook and what mode of learning he will go for. The other two candidates I interviewed was a housewife and a 25-year-old working man. I asked the same set of questions and scenarios to my other candidates too. Not surprisingly, most of their answers were entirely different from each other. Knowing their opinions helped me to understand some common problems and pain points. To verify this, I did an online survey, including questions that I found common among my candidates.

Here is the result of my survey

Competitive Analysis

There were tons of competitors in this field. So I took 3 out of them, which were considered as best in class apps with above 4.4 stars, and 2 of them were Editor’s choice app. I went through all three of these apps, and pretty much every app justifies its rating. Modern looking UI, Immersive guide, tones of the recipe, and everything is there. To understand the flaws in the apps, I used the google play store itself. I always use this technique to recognize deficiencies in competitors by filtering user feedback with 1–3 stars on their app and made a report. I use this report to add features from competitors that are successful and also identify features that are missing in their apps.

After going through these three apps, I understood my idea is not a unique one. It’s already implemented in one of the apps called “recipe book,” but many other excellent features were missing in this app. So there is always a room to enhance. None tried to tackle this issue by developing a virtual assistant, and hence, this app would be an assistant rather than an old-style recipe book so that it will be a fresh idea in the market.

User Persona

UI Design and Prototype

The major concern about UI was to design something minimal and easy to use. I always loved designing illustrative UI. I took inspiration from Google Assistant and a few other Ui8 templates. My primary aim was to make it simple so that a 36-year-old housewife and teenager can use the app without any hassle. I used illustrative options to make the app attractive and, at the same time, easy to understand.

Usability Test

Now it’s time to test the design and concept of our app. Due to time constraints from sketched wireframe, I directly went into high fidelity UI design rather than going through wireframes, low fidelity designs, etc. I used the Adobe XD prototype feature to give life to my design. I haven’t done the end to end prototyping. Instead, I was planning to provide a scenario to the test subject and see how he/she is going to navigate through the app without any assistance. I asked them to use the app for cooking a non-veg meal within 15 min, but you don’t know the name of any ingredients, and you don’t like to read the complete guide. Users don’t have any prior experience with the app, so I wanted to see how fast they can finish the process and where they are going to get stuck. After completing the usability test with my three subjects, I understood some of the flaws in my design and how I should improve them.

Results and Findings :

One of the issues present in my design was the size of the icons in the navigation bar, Younger subjects didn’t have any problem with the size of the icons, but 36-year-old subjects faced difficulty in understanding the icons and what they represent. So I increased the size of the icon and added text along with the icons. The second issue was the finish button. Everyone expected the button to come from the bottom, and they were not giving attention to the bottom right corner. So I replaced the rounded float button with a tab button that pops up from the bottom just like all other cards do.

Old Button

New Button

User Experience Flow

This diagram is prepared to understand the complete functionalities and how screens are linked to each other. This diagram helps me to decide where there is any dead-end or incompleteness in the design before handover the project to the developer team.

Challenges Faced

Designing the app has been a challenging and rewarding journey. It was clear from the onset that the major challenge will be to come up with something that is comparatively competitive against well-established brands. Another difficulty was to demonstrate AR technology while conducting a usability test. After conducting research and competitive analysis, it ended up with extra features that I didn’t plan initially. So I had to come up with solutions for those problems while designing this app. Also, It was difficult to design something that is easy to understand for all age groups.

Conclusion

My goal of this application is to allow users to quickly learn and prepare their favorite food or something they haven’t tried so far. Kalavara is designed in a way that it can replace all the other recipe app and save up your space. The app will show food that can be prepared with ingredients that you have in stock instead of spending extra money on buying what isn’t there. The app also tailors the nutritional values with insights about calories, fat, carbohydrates, protein, etc. This app also provides complete details about utensils required for cooking specific food items and alternatives for them.

So I send them this case study, and they responded to me with an offer letter and a higher salary package within a few days. Unfortunately, I was not able to accept that offer letter due to some personal problems and already got selected as a product designing role at a reputed product company. I hope you enjoy reading the whole UX research process I did in this case. I discovered meaningful insights that might be very useful in future projects.

Love micro-interactions and animations?

check out www.rohitkrishna.com