Ricepe

Overview

It's a school project supervised by Professor Dominic Mentor. I want to explore mobile learning and health education while solving the problem. I designed this app from ground up based on research findings. Over the course of 10 weeks, I conducted primary research to build empathy and identify pain points and opportunities. Synthesis and analysis of my research findings uncovered key insights that informed the design principles I used for ideation and concept development. Finally, I prototyped and evaluated designs in context with actual users to refine and improve the experience.

Whole Process

I went through the product development lifecycle to iterate on and deliver a user experience that meets the high quality bar.

Communication

I created wireframes, storyboards and user flows to effectively communicate interaction and design ideas

Product Iterations

I improved the user experience significantly by iterating the designs based on qualitative and quantitative data.

Problem Statement

How might we assist international students in cooking?

Discover

Background

In the US, there are more than 1 million international students. This brings many challenges as well as opportunities. The challenge I want to focus on is how international students cook in a foreign country.

Current Situation

I am lonely studying abroad. I miss the food in my hometown.
I’m from France. There is no language barrier. But I still struggled to find the ingredients I want.
I still use the same recipe app when I was in my hometown. It’s really difficult to identify the name of ingredients in English.

International students want to cook at home. But the culture shock and language barrier bring a lot of challenges.

My goal: By using this app, users can easily buy the ingredients and learn how to cook.

Target users: International students

Research

Surveys

I handed out surveys, collected and analyzed the results.

User Interviews

I performed 15 formal scripted user interviews with international students.

Competitor Analysis

I downloaded many recipe apps, used them and collected the advantages and disadvantages.

As an international student, I was able to reach out to many international students and conducted user research. Because this design was inspired by my own experience, so I conducted surveys at first to identify if it's a common problem for international students.

From the survey result, I can draw the conclusion that many international students want to cook by themself.
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Based on the result, I conducted 1-on-1 user interviews with 15 target users.

I then observed other products that provide similar service. Through competitor analysis, I understood how others were managing their business and knew about the mistakes they are making so that I can avoid them proactively and save my product from possible setbacks.

Analyze

Research Insights

I analyzed the research findings and built a persona. I used the power of personas to ground and humanize user insight while keeping different human attributes distinct. I used these spectrums to ideate and iterate in the design process alongside a series of physical, social, economic, temporal, cultural contexts.

Ideate

Brainstorm

I came up with more than 50 ideas. Then I analyzed each idea and selected 10 of them as the ones I want to keep developing.

I began narrowing down process by carrying out the Six Thinking Hats exercise and Pugh’s decision-matrix method to have something more quantitative to work with. My criteria were based on my desired outcomes along with two extra criteria: was the concept feasible and am I excited about it? I analyzed three design principles as my design guidelines so that my following design would be better aligned with users' core value.

Information Architecture

Design

Prototype

I quickly generated a low-fi prototype and did two rounds of usability testing. I first tested with two target users to get feedback on the usability and flow.

Here are some takeaways from the usability testing:
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1, Some icons seem interactive but they’re not
2, Users have problem about the plus icon on the home page and the function icon on the portfolio page. Some icons don’t make sense
3, Some navigations between pages made the user confused. Users got lost after posting their recipes.

After adjusting the prototypes based on the feedback, I conducted one-on-one think loud test and interview with 6 Chinese students who study in the US.

The overall feedback is positive:

1, My testers thought that the prototype is beautiful and well-organized.
2, Some people mentioned that the prototype just looks like a real App. Maybe that’s because I downloaded several popular recipe Apps and used some similar elements.

Future

In terms of next step, I would like to focus on helping people find the store to buy the ingredients. Now the users can know the names and looks of the ingredients, but that doesn’t guarantee that they can find a store where the ingredients are available. Moving forward, I will think of ways in which the store information can be shown with the ingredients. For instance, I can add another layer with the store information that will pop out when the user clicks the ingredient. Users will be able to edit the store information.

In addition, I imagine that if this app was designed for Chinese international students in USA, it can later be an app for international students in a foreign country.