To cook, or not to cook?

Concept recipe finding app designed on General Assembly’s UXDI course.

Imagine this. You’re working from home and have Zoom meetings all morning and afternoon with an hour sandwiched in the middle for lunch (pun intended 😉).

For most people working remotely, this is not too far of a stones throw away from reality. During my first week at General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive course, this was certainly our reality.

The Problem:

For our first project, we were tasked with designing a mobile app that would help a fellow classmate with a particular problem they had, be it a real problem or a fictitious one. The problem I was designing a solution for was that my classmate, Bo, had a limited time to cook a meal during her busy schedule and wanted a way to get inspiration to cook new meals with the ingredients she had to hand.

My Role and the Process:

Since this was an individual project with a limited time scope of a week, I went through the full Double Diamond Design process by myself. I conducted several user interviews with Bo to really understand what she was struggling with and then designed solutions surrounding this problem. I then tested the design on other classmates and then provided the final mid-fidelity sketch to Bo in the end-of-project presentation.

Key Learnings:

Having completed this project, there are a few takeaways that I’ve learnt during the process:

• Assumptions: It is very easy to fall into the trap of designing a solution for ourselves. As designers we must focus on what our users’ needs are primarily.

• Research: I can not stress this enough! This relates back to the takeaway above. If you do not understand the user enough, you will end up creating a solution that falls short and ultimately doesn’t solve the users’ needs.

The Solution:

A set of mid-fidelity sketched wireframes were created to solve Bo’s problem. Below shows what the wireframes looked like.

Click here to read the full case study on Medium