Oui Chef

Background

Cooking is an integral part of everyday life. From marinating meat to kneading bread, cooking is a hands-on process. Home cooks need a way to follow, organize, and keep track of their own recipes without worrying about creating a mess or getting lost in the recipe’s method. 

This chart from Statista shows voice assistant usage in the United States as of February 2018 by situation and device type. According to the source, around 37 percent of respondents said they use voice assistant technology via mobile while they are cooking. While voice assistants are increasing in use, this statistic shows that mobile is a market work expanding in making the VUI component of our cooking app a good addition to have.

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User Pain Point + Feedback

We asked 50 respondents what the hardest parts of cooking were and then asked them to rate these hard parts on average on a scale from 1-10. 10 being the hardest and 1 being the easiest. We learned that clean up was rated 5 out of 10, time consumption was rated 6.5 out of 10, deciding recipes was 7.2 out of 10, and getting lost in recipes was 4 out of 5.  

We later validated that users had issues with keeping their phones/ tablets clean while using it to follow recipes. They would lose their place and have to go back a step in the recipe. This is an everyday occurrence that they wish they had a solution to.

We conducted one on one interviews to understand what motivates users to cook at home. With time management and finding new recipes i being a large motivation why people are not interested in cooking. 

Landing on the Solution

“Voice interface design uses speech recognition to allow users to engage with technology using voice commands. As the world becomes increasingly fast-paced and information-dense, voice technologies are challenging the dominance of the graphical user interface and can make the experience much smoother.

Keyboards can work for text-intensive tasks like writing a blog, but for simple tasks like searches, post updates, adjusting controls, and getting directions, people would rather just talk. They can save many steps, for example, typing in an address on a small screen, but the experience must function flawlessly. In reality, voice interface design works together with tap and swipe technologies to create a better user experience.” - according to UXPIN blog

Since our users use Siri and are encountering these cooking issues daily, we decided to provide a recipe app where the users could store their recipes and have a voice component to help guide them when cooking. We were incorporating an element (Siri) they were already using for other tasks to now help them simplify their cooking process.

Anna created a User Flow. Here we were able to map out as a team what steps a potential user might follow when finding our app. 

With the basis of the recipe flow created we also made a user journey map. This really helped the team establish what was important to our MVP because it allowed us to focus on the key issues we want to solve for our users.  

To better determine what features we wanted to keep in our mobile app we came together as a team and talked about the users pain points, how we can solve them and then how feasible each task would be.

We put these items into a prioritization matrix.

Explanation of solution

We have created a VUI (Voice User Interface) guided recipe app. Users can input their recipes and ingredients into the app or choose one of our preloaded recipes and get started. The Voice controlled navigation within our app will allow users to easily follow recipes. Users will immediately go to the next step without the worry of following a recipe in a traditional way. They can also do voice commands to go back a step as needed. This would make cooking more conversational and efficient.

Low fi of adding a recipe on the left. On the right, we’ve decided to compartmentalize the steps in adding a recipe. So that the user doesn’t feel overwhelmed when inputting a recipe. Making the screen smaller and letting the users add a recipe one step of the time allowed for a more streamlined process in user testing.

This is a low fi  image of the home screen.  Below, we’ve added our persona’s name Oliver to make it feel more personable. We also made the photos much larger because from our interviews we found that people eat with their eyes first when it comes to choosing an online recipe.

Final Product

Next steps

We will continue testing our app with our original group of testers for feedback on user flow since we have already validated our idea. We have already moved around certain icons and decided against prioritizing the share feature based on our previous feedback..