App mobile | 2023

Timerfood Case Study

Summary

Do you remember the lockdown and how we are now facing a new normal? Remote work and responsibilities at home led us to somewhat neglect our diet.
But what if you could schedule your cooking tasks in a fun and simple way, regardless of the ingredients you have at home?

The analysis of people's behavior after the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown has influenced customs and generated adaptations towards new ways of carrying out some daily activities, in this case remote work, the influence on socialization and the warmth of human contact.
In Argentina, it has been of interest to deeply understand one of the situations that affects dedication to cooking due to investing more time in work, affecting health, economy and perhaps how to cook correctly, leading to an increase in waste at home and continuous purchases of delivery food.
Here are some details:
  • 46.234.830 of the audience between 25 and 45 years old estimated in Argentina in the year 2022 have highly demanding jobs, increasing productivity due to workers dedicating 9% more time to their remote jobs.
  • 21% of Argentinians eat outside of their homes at least once a week or more often.
  • The main causes of food waste at home are related to our behavior as consumers, either because they do not meet the requirements of shape, size, or appearance that we usually associate with "quality".
  • The use of delivery applications during mandatory isolation increased by 400%

Problem definition

To understand the situation, we analyzed:
  • People who hold highly demanding formal jobs.
  • They have acquired less agility to organize and come up with varied and nutritious homemade meals.
  • Frequent consumption of low-nutritional quality foods made outside of the home.
  • Lack of knowledge about their composition, impacting their health and economy.

What can be improved?

To help these people improve their interests and skills to spend time in the kitchen:
  • Use motivation.
  • Expand the necessary knowledge about how food influences health.
  • Show the influence on their health.
  • Emphasize the importance for their economy.

How can it be achieved?

Create an application that provides ideas, suggestions, and recommendations for meals with ingredients present at home:
  • It can observe the composition.
  • Estatus.
  • Quality
  • Quantity
  • Specifications based on a list of pantry products and that encourage the challenge of cooking.

Why is it necessary?

Responsible and intelligent nutrition is even capable of promoting sustainable solutions, encouraging interest in seeing cooking as an important aspect in the growth of human values and demonstrating the environmental impact generated by uncontrolled consumerism that generates more plastic and organic waste.
This is in line with the Sustainable Development Goals 1030 of the United Nations.

  • HEALTH AND WELLNESS
    "Promote interest in healthy, reliable, and conscious nutrition by stimulating domestic activity, with the purpose of reducing risks to diseases."

  • RESPONSIBLE CONSUMPTION
    "Become aware of our level of consumption and expenses that influence the capacity of resources for waste processing."

Archetypes

Gabriela

Social communicator

She likes to go for walks, spend time with family, especially receiving friends. Apart from work, he is capable of including other activities. She likes to use social media. When it comes to cooking, she doesn't mind. With what he has at home, she can imagine what he can make and what he might crave. She tries to do grocery shopping every week to ensure that what he buys will be fresh during the week. She doesn't worry much about expiration dates of some products, but he invests a lot of time in keeping track of things.

Empathy map

Carlos

QA Analyst

He shares with friends, among his activities apart from work and university, he cooks for himself or when he gets together with friends at his house, although he is not an expert; but he tries to be responsible with what he has learned, cooking according to what he has and craves. Sometimes he takes pictures of the dish. He does grocery shopping every week, without a list of products, buying what he thinks of, looking for economy.

Empathy map

Benchmarking

#1

Whisk:A recipe app that allows creating activities such as networks between communities.
  • Strengths
  • Search with a lot of variety.
  • Navigation is intuitive and direct.
  • Explanatory and personalized information.
  • It is very flexible with the needs of users.
  • Consistent between screens.
  • Icons, buttons, and images are relatively easy to understand.
  • It encourages users to stay within the application by providing access to social media content.
  • Weaknesses
  • Search is difficult due to distractions from other content.
  • It is difficult to quickly find information as expected.
  • There is a lack of air between elements.
  • Ingredient icons can make reading complicated.
  • Desirable to have it in Spanish language.

#2

Sidechef: A recipe app with more formal content and also the creation of groups and communities.
  • Strengths
  • Quick search with necessary information.
  • More specialized content.
  • Consistent between screens.
  • Icons, buttons have easy readability.
  • Weaknesses
  • Does not allow returning to an interrupted query.
  • Desirable to have it in Spanish language.
  • Moderately encourages users to stay within the application for other content interests.

#3

SuperCook: A recipe app that presents multiple alternatives, but it is a content of recommendations based on internet pages.
  • Strengths
  • Quick search.
  • Simple interface.
  • Offers a variety of recipes.
  • Provides specific information about recipes..
  • Weaknesses
  • You must find more details of a recipe outside the application.
  • Very generic information.
  • Does not have icons or images that allow identifying the consistency of the content.
  • Does not encourage users to stay within the application for other content interests.

MVP

(Minimum Viable Product) A wide range of features was proposed, including user registration, language and location selection, ingredient input to obtain recipe suggestions, meal planning, diet choice, and a points and levels system. With this tool, users will be able to easily create personalized meal plans and access a wide variety of recipes tailored to their culinary needs and preferences.
  • Registration.
  • Language selection.
  • View ingredients.
  • View recipes.
  • Include ingredients.
  • Choose location.
  • Preparation instructions.
  • Choose type of diet.
  • Calculate ingredients.
  • Nutritional information.
  • Brand challenges.

USERFLOW

SKETCHING

Hand sketches were made where the format was divided into 8 parts to create 4 different models of the 2 most important pages of the application. Then, I continued the process of elaborating the other prototypes by hand for the pages that I considered important using the Crazy 8 technique.

Finally, I selected the options that seemed to me the best ideas that adapted to what was functional, necessary, usable, and possible to solve, aligned with the flows determined by the Information Architecture and User Flow.

WIREFRAMES

This is a minimal view of the flow so you can see how the relationship between the different screens in higher fidelity, corresponding to the parameters of the MVP.

PROTOTYPE

I present to you some screens so you can observe the structures through Patterns and Guidelines that determined the incorporation of best practices on measurements, grids, and positioning of components, aimed at a native Android operating system application.

UI Kit

Now we can see some of those pieces that include aspects that give structure at the level of styles, colors, contrasts, icons, buttons, illustrations, and all the parts that inspired me to establish a representative graphic image of this application.
  • Components
  • Cards
  • Icons
  • Buttons

USER TESTING

Test Objective:To verify if the planned design allows users to successfully navigate within the app.
Methodology:Usability Test - Unmoderated
Task 1: Register in the app - Hypothetical Scenario: Suppose it's almost mealtime, but you need to cook and don't know what to prepare; you think of using an application that can help you. With that said: Would you be willing to show us how you registered?
Task 2: Log in - Hypothetical Scenario: Assuming you've already registered and want to see the recipes soon, at this point: Would you like to show us how to get to the main page of the app?
Task 3: Find the recipe and prepare the food - Hypothetical Scenario: Once here, you proceed to search for a recipe and prepare your meal: Would you be willing to show us how to find the recipe until you finish preparing it?
Task 4: Execute other dynamics - Hypothetical Scenario: Suppose now that you have completed several recipes and you are curious to look for something else: Would you be willing to show us another interesting dynamic found within the application?
  • What worked
  • 4/4 Users successfully registered with 100%.
  • 3/4 Users were able to navigate, read and complete the entry.
  • 4/4 Users were able to complete the task.
  • What didn't work
  • 4/4 Had difficulties understanding that there were functions that were not active because it was a prototype (Keyboard) and understanding that as new users they should start with a new registration.
  • ¼ of the users could not complete the task successfully due to technical problems with the platform.
  • 4/4 Users always had confusion when searching for the recipe, as they always went to another module or went to other pages, delaying the time to complete the main task.
  • The component does not seem very attractive, the prototype without color does not interest the user in reviewing it.
  • Applied improvements
  • Changes on several details of spaces and highlighting the login much more.
  • Improvements to the content of the general Recipes page and placement of a card to go to the stock of ingredients first and then search for the recipe and once in the stock of ingredients, in case they want to add others, take them to filters plus ingredients.
  • Placement of a more explanatory text, in addition to the location of a badge that indicates that there is a pending challenge to earn benefits, the idea is to attract the user.

¡Thanks for watch!