Healthy Cooking. In one click. — Fun People Cooking App Case Study
By: Daniella Dasso
Tags: UX, Design Thinking, Interaction Design, Research

Hi there!

Here at Ironhack’s UX/UI Bootcamp, we were faced with the challenge of designing a new app for Fun People Inc, a fictional educational company specialized in workshop camps, for people who want to take an online version of one of the courses.

To keep things short and sweet, Fun People Inc. needs a way to provide an engaging online experience for people who cannot attend the workshop camp.

The deliverables included an MVP of a mid-fidelity prototype including relevant features that help exemplify the proposed solution.But first…

Let me take you into the story:

It’s Monday morning and you set up this week’s resolution: you are going to eat healthy this time. Fast forward to Wednesday, its 8.30pm and you just got out of your job. You are tired, you are hungry and the last thing you want to do is to think about what you need to cook. You get home, quickly browse around your kitchen and you only find some spinach, corn and a lonely and sad chicken sitting on the dark corners of your fridge.

Got the picture? Now let’s dive in.

Research: Competition

Everybody’s got to eat, so is there really a need for a need for cooking course?

I was genuinely curious to know what is out there and if there is a gap in the market for this course or not. So I started by doing some market research to understand the competitive landscape.

Competition Analysis

So, what?

Not surprisingly, there is a vast amount of companies in this industry. From more professional online courses like “Le Cordon Bleu Online Learning” to “Top Chef University”, people have plenty of options to choose from if they are interested in following a more “traditional” course.

And if they are just looking to learn a new recipe, Google or Youtube offers hundreds if not thousands of choices of cooking sites. If you are looking for an App, the same thing applies. And let’s not forget about a more indirect type of competition, but super important nonetheless: Glovo, Deliveroo and other food delivery Apps. Why are these important? Well, if you are hungry and don’t have time to cook, what’s easier than ordering a Glovo?

Research: User

Do people enjoy cooking?

For the user, I continued by defining some research objectives to help me frame my research. “How is the cooking experience like? What is the stage people like the most, and the least? Why?”

I conducted 8 user interviews and 1 survey that was answered by 66 people. Here’s what I found:

Insight 1:

Millenials want to eat healthy but don’t have a lot of time to cook

Some of the primary research I did help me confirm this. Most people tend to think of cooking as a “second job” which “stresses them out.”

Insight 2:

Millenials feel pressured to live a healthy life

but because they have no clue of what to eat or how to mix different food types, they end up eating the same meal every day.

Insight 3:

The hardest part of cooking happens even before getting into the kitchen

only 10% of all the people who took the survey enjoy the first stage of cooking (organization, shopping, recipe search), meaning 90% doesn’t really enjoy it at all.

User Persona

Meet Vanessa, 33 yrs old, full-time worker.

“Where there is a will there is not always a way.”

User Persona

Scenarios:

User some has ingredients at home to cook. User doesn’t have any ingredients at home to cook.

With the help of my user persona, my next step was to define my Design Question:

How Might We help young people who want to start living a healthier life but have no time, to improve their organization and initial learning experience in healthy cooking, so they don’t stress out?

Following this, I started to define my MVP. I listed a bunch of features that my App could have and that of course, answered the needs of my user persona and to my value proposition. I then used the MOSCOW framework to categorize and prioritize them:

MOSCOW

Value Proposition

Fun People Cooking App. Healthy Cooking. In one click.

Fun People Cooking is an App that offers organisation and personalised learning tools to help find the ingredients and healthy recipes, in the easiest and fastest way, for young people who want to learn how to cook in a healthy but stressless way.

I then created my sitemap to understand the different pages I needed to bring my value proposition to life, and most importantly, to understand the different relationships between these pages. Immediately after this, I created two user flows for the two scenarios I had picked before: 1. User has no food at home and wants to cook a healthy meal, and 2. User has some food at home and wants to cook a healthy meal.

User flow 1: User has no food at home

User Flow 2: User has some food at home

With the help of these two user flows, it became a little more clear how the user was going to navigate through the App. I was ready to move to my prototype.

Mid-fidelity Prototype

After working on and testing some initial low-fidelity wireframes, I learned a lot about how the user was expecting to find information and also the type of words and language they preferred to use.

I iterated quickly and moved to mid-fidelity prototypes. Here I will explain only a couple of screens, but feel free to test the whole prototype out here.

Flow 1: User has some ingredients at home

Flow 2: User doesn’t have any ingredients at home

Next steps

Basic more “traditional” cooking workshops

Based on secondary research showing the vast amounts of workshops online, suggesting this is still relevant to the market.

2. Smart it up: Siri and smart fridges

So the users can interact more “freely” with the App, as well as connecting smart fridges that allow users to see what they have on their fridges before even getting home.

3. Partnering with local supermarkets

So they can advertise particular products or recipes for a given fee, and help with the delivery of groceries.

Key Learnings

Fail fast

That is, to share my ideas as soon as possible to get feedback and iterate right away.

2. Read the brief several times

during the whole process, as sometimes we can become distracted by one particular insight, but then realise that it sadly doesn’t fit the brief.

What made this project special?

It taught me to pace myself and learn to love the process. Sometimes things fail, but that’s how we learn, right?

Thanks for reading all the way down to here. I hope you enjoyed reading about this mini-adventure as much as I enjoyed doing it!