A product that can assist college students in preparing different kinds and amounts of food they want to eat.
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A product that can assist college students in preparing different kinds and amounts of food they want to eat.
Group
12 weeks
We chose to pursue the topic of food knowledge and attitudes because after meeting as a group and discussing different options, we thought that this topic was relevant for college students and one that would provide a solution that could occupy a large solution space.
We developed a mid-high fidelity prototype for a product that helps students prepare ingredients for meals they want to cook, cutting down preparation time and ultimately the time they would otherwise have to forgo from other tasks.
Being able to user test and evaluate the design, we found that users appreciated the intuitiveness of the product and the role it played in simplifying their cooking process.
We used the Double Diamond Model — a framework consisting of divergent ideation and convergent decision for problem and solution definition — as the foundation of the project's structure.
We explored various potential problem spaces and the solutions which already existed and attempted to tackle them. From this set, we decided on the single one to explore further.
We ultimately identified our problem space to be nutrition, particularly how students who are tight on budget or too busy can oftentimes forgo basic nutritional needs for the other pressing concerns in their day-to-day lives. We were curious to explore how students currently tackle this problem and tap into the widespread impact a solution could potentially have.
We began pursuing the project by conducting 6 contextual interviews with students who fit our user group and each had unique attitudes and habits when it came to consuming/preparing food.
Using an affinity diagram, we strove to find out more about the people we interviewed through finding key insights to inform a user persona that would provide the basis for our design decisions going forward. We did this using Miro.
After composing and analyzing our affinity diagram, we consolidated 5 primary insights from what we learned about our interviewees.
Time constraints are considered at almost every step of the food preparation process, including during recipe selection, grocery shopping, and actual food preparation.
Financial constraints limit grocery options, as some ingredients were too expensive and influenced some users to buy money-saving ingredients like “family-sized” products.
Food waste was a primary concern for almost all interviewees, both for financial and environmentally ethical reasons. Measures to prevent food waste were common.
Nutritional considerations are highly valued and play an active role in dietary habits, but financial and time constraints often limit the ability to fully achieve desired nutritional goals.
Despite the fact that cooking is a necessary task, it seems that individuals still want to have fun with the cooking process.
From our interviews and insights, we created a persona to encompass the problem space we identified. Meet Keja.
When Keja first started living off campus, she found herself struggling to maintain healthy eating habits and often skipped meals because she didn’t have time to make herself food throughout the day and couldn’t afford meals at on-campus eateries. She decided to meet with a nutritionist who tremendously helped her by introducing her to cheap, simple, and delicious meals to make, which she packs for lunch.
Keja values doing well academically, but also aims to manage her time well and maintain her personal care, through methods such as healthy eating habits. She used to find herself prioritizing her academics and other obligations above her health and personal care, but is now actively working on finding a good balance to maintain her well-being.
Minimize time spent cooking and preparing foods while eating a nutritious and balanced diet within her budget
Graduate from university with decent grades so that she can have a successful career after graduation and live a healthy and happy life
Feel in control of her time and feel confident about her diet being relatively healthy
We wanted to take a closer look at a smaller amount of more profound insights and investigate the deeper reasonings behind the ones we identified. Some of the questions we asked were:
We discovered that while students meal prep to save time later in the week, that time is not necessarily conserved when having to make all the food they need. We also discovered that student desire for quality is sometimes incongruent with the decisions they actually make. For example, while nearly all our interviewees indicated that they prefer fresh food, there was a variety of reported shopping behaviors such as looking for frozen or bulk products that contradicted this preference.
Digging deeper in the Insights meant that we also had to revisit the requirements of our product. Realizing most of our requirements dealt with a specific kind of solution, we revised them to broaden our solution space.
The product should not take users much effort to learn and should not take much time to use
The product should be portable and not take up a lot of physical space
The product should be affordable and available to students on a budget
The product should be accessible to people of varying abilities
We started the solution brainstorming phase by investigating the existing solution space, looking for digital and non-digital products that tackled similar problems to our own and brainstorming by collectively sketching potential solutions.
See my idea contributions below.
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Our requirements indicated that we should ideate a solution that can effectively save the user’s time in preparing or finding food to eat.
Additionally, the product we chose to focus on could also indirectly fulfill our cost-efficiency requirement, it could eliminate the need to pay extra for fresh pre-cut items at the supermarket.
Last, automating a physical- and time-intensive task could ensure that users of various abilities are able to use it.
Therefore, in the spirit of saving time by doing your expediting your food prepping, we came up with Chop Chop.
We thought of 3 sets of tasks and subtasks our persona, Keja, desired to complete with the help of Chop Chop. These tasks and subtasks provided the structure for our 3 Scenarios, which were translated into Storyboards.
The first prototype was all about settling on the form and scale of the design. I modeled it mostly with cardboard to provide rigidity, and used modular paper elements to simulate the digital interface interactions.
See the video below for a happy path walkthrough of the user interaction!
After developing individual low-fidelity prototypes, each group member had users test theirs to discover the positives and negatives with their takes on the design. The overall categories for improvement were:
After receiving feedback from users on the low-fidelity prototype, we implemented these changes while constructing the more refined prototype.
We developed the form to mid fidelity, improving its materiality, and developed an digital interface in Figma with higher-fidelity aesthetic, layout, and interactions.
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After developing our prototype, we conducted 4 usability tests to assess the user experience of our product.
After receiving feedback from users and taking their suggestions into consideration, we compiled a Before and After video with some of the implemented improvements.
From brainstorming, to user research, to ideating designs, to prototyping, and then to evaluating, I learned how every part of the HCD process fits into each other, as well as how iteration and feedback become involved (if not vital) in many of these steps.
Following the design insights — rather than letting my intuition sway decisions — can lead to innovative solutions. My group and I did not foresee that we would come up with the product we did; however, it ended up being one that was not only novel, but also addressed the problems raised by the user research we conducted.
One of the key takeaways for me was how patience with defining the problem and solution spaces not only helps you target meaningful issues, but also ideate the most creative solutions. It was interesting for me to see how this design approach molded our process and final product.
Given the limitations we had in terms of resources like materials and budget, we could not hone a true high-fidelity prototype, and exploring this more would be an intriguing exercise to see where our solution could go.
