Food gurus

While on one side Millennials are titled as "the wellness generation" who value health, there's still a huge room for improvement for Millennials in terms of eating habits to give justice to the title.

Studies show that lack of time, hassle of grocery shopping, on-demand requirements prevent Millennials from cooking at home everyday and they end up eating out most of the time.

This habit plays a huge role in affecting health and expenses. Now this is a big problem to be solved.

Hence, I took up this challenge with my team to "encourage millennials in Bellevue to learn cooking instead of eating out for dinner in order to improve health and save money ."

THE CHALLENGE

"How do we encourage millennials in Bellevue to learn cooking instead of eating out for dinner in order to improve health and save money?"

MY ROLE

I was involved in user research, requirement gathering, ideation, and usability testing , where I led the ideation and designing of the solution.

THE SOLUTION

THE PROCESS

Define problem

User Research

Ideate

User testing

Iterate

1. Defining the problem space | Define Problem

We believe that defining the problem is very important because it keeps us focused on what we want to solve and build. In order to do this, we framed the design questions and research questions to help us direct in the right track.

After brainstorming and considering many perspectives and set of questions, we defined our problem as :

"How do we encourage millennials in Bellevue to learn cooking instead of eating out for dinner in order to improve health and save money?"

To get the above question, we used secondary research as explained below to answer the who, what, when , where and why aspects of it.

2. Identifying the target users | Secondary Research | User Research

Why did we specifically focus on millennials in Bellevue ?

While we were deciding between teenagers, children and young adults as our target users, we settled on Millennials eventually on the basis of our research results.We did some secondary research to find out who eats out the most , and shockingly, most answers pointed towards "millennials".We chose Bellevue because our study showed that it has majority of young population which includes millennials.These results made us focus more on this specific domain. Following are some snaps of our analysis about Bellevue demographics :

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From the above, we learnt that the secondary research helped us identify who is facing the problem we are addressing. This helped us move forward towards the goal.

3. Knowing the users | Primary Research | User Research

Even though we knew who our users are, we still didn't know what they think about the problem we were addressing, or if they even consider it as a problem at all. We also wanted to know what prevents them from cooking at home everyday, and spend money to eat out, or order food. To answer these questions, we designed and conducted an online survey and field observation , where we observed our target users closely without their knowledge. Then the result of these studies were compared to see if our target users do what they say. Surprisingly, the results were way too far from each other. In the survey, they claimed "time" as the biggest hindrance that stops them from cooking, but in the field observation, they spent more than 45 mins ,which is more than average time for easy recipes. Following are some of the glimpses from our primary research :

Target Location 1 - Crossroads, Bellevue

Observation captured

A young woman and her kids ordered more food than they could finish.

Target Location 2 - Crossroads, Bellevue

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From the above work, we did triangulation to get a bigger picture of what we achieved so far and of what is to be done further.

The triangulation taught that the users don't want to spend much time in cooking, and are comfortable with online sources as a way of learning. This gave us further direction to think about solution in a specific way. To give another validation to our understanding, I created empathy map to understand the user results better.

With the help of above empathy map, I created personas to help us segment the market and our users. We segmented our users (millennials) into two sub-types : Students, working class. Following are the personas for both our user types :

4. Sketching | Ideation

Now that the goal was clear, it was time to be creative and move towards the solution. In order to communicate our ideas to each other, and to be able to visualize the ideas, I sketched some of the scenarios we discussed in the team. Sharing one of the storyboards sketched :

5. Walkthroughs | Ideation

While discussing about how the solution might look like, we had many details to remember , which would make the solution more efficient. However, to have an idea of how the detailed solution might look like, I designed the below walkthroughs on the basis of my team's discussions :

All of our discussed solutions were mainly revolving around some form of technology . However, our proposed solution was finalized on the basis of testing its viability, feasibility and desirability. Some of the other options were expensive to implement, while some others were beyond technical scope. Some of the other options that we considered are :

1. Building a small robot who would help users in cooking and teaching (could pull up cooking videos for the user, or use AI to identify the user's mood and propose recipe to him accordingly etc).

2. Build VR glasses for the users which would show them the cooking videos, give live feedback from the trainer and also switch the glasses on and off on user demand.

3. Create a marketplace for millennials who want to learn cooking with millennials who want to teach cooking. For fun, we initially named this as "tinder for cooking".

However, for our final solution, we combined the marketplace concept from the third idea with the live feedback part of the second idea. This combination seems to be more viable, feasible and desirable for our target users.

In this , we are trying to connect the learners with trainers over an app, and then setup a live session for them during actual cooking time for live feedback. This live session could be on a big screen mounted in the kitchen, away from the stove so that the user doesn't have to bother about handling the mobile or any device while his hands are occupied in the cooking process.

To test our final idea, we decided to create low fidelity models of our first prototype to make it faster and cheap, and conducted the usability test on the real users.

6. Testing our idea | User testing

I played a role of facilitator in it, while my other teammates were the cooking trainer and video recorder.Following are the glimpses from our usability test :

The user feedback from this test was very valuable as we learnt what went well so far and what was still missing or confusing. To surprise, our users were mostly very comfortable with the navigations and call to actions. Most of the feedback was regarding the missing features and some points of confusion.For example, users were hoping to see a list of ingredients and utensils required to prepare a recipe. Also, in the live video session, users said they would love to have "mute video" option where, they would get to decide whether to show on camera or not. However, we worked on the feedback and I created the mockups for our final demo.

Secondary Research

Survey

Field Observation

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User Images inspired from google. Persona of a young working mom with two kids.

User Images inspired from google. Persona of a young student.

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Affinity Diagram.

Our team.

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MY REFLECTION ON THIS PROJECT

This project being super timed, the design thinking approach made the journey far more smooth than it could be. Pivoting back was much less than other times where we make decisions thoughtlessly or in hurry. Design thinking challenges thinking about the problem broadly, as well as specifically as and when required. It helped me be focused on the problem and direct my thoughts on the right track. Being a former professional UX designer, this project was a great validation to my knowledge and skills in the user experience domain. Moreover, working with a business professional and a developer was even more challenging and fun due to the different perspectives on the same issue. I have been applying design thinking not only in my professional life, but also in m y personal life since many years, and I wish to continue doing the same in future. It makes life much smoother and predictable as everything is data based and can be tracked.