Nescipes
Timeline: Dec 2016 – June 2017
Project Type: Class Project
Role: Product Designer
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Figma, Marvel, Raspberry Pi, Arduino IDE, Python, Laser-cutting, Assorted Shop Tools
Skills: User research, Needfinding, Developing User Personas, Storyboarding, Wireframing, Rapid Prototyping, Fabrication, Product Development, Project Management
Context
This project was a joint effort between Stanford University’s ME310 program, Paris-est. d.school, and Nestle France. Nestle France has challenged us to not only reinvent a range of culinary aids to help people better understand their products in the kitchen, but also to find the next big trends in the food experience.
In this study, I highlight only a section of the project that conveys my workflow when framing an ambiguous problem and the use of quantitative and qualitative research to address hypotheses during product design. The full report of our findings can be found in Stanford Library’s catalog.
2 weeks from idea to prototype
1. Understand the experience
4. Prototype and testing
Building empathy through needfinding
To better understand the food space and explore possible trends, we needed to go see the “food experience” first-hand in settings where food lives: groceries, restaurants, homes, supply stores, and culinary aid technology providers. Our initial research was local, but we were able to perform research overseas later on during the project with our French counterparts.
Observations and user interviews help us understand the end-to-end experience of how people interact with food. This helped us identify potential issues or circumstances of people’s lives that affect the way they choose/shop/eat/interact with food.
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- We spoke with shoppers at groceries to understand our users and their journey to find food.
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- Bay Area shoppers often shop once a week for their meals.
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- At a french grocery, we learned that most shoppers shop daily to cook due to limited space at home.
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- We spoke to families, students, and couples in the context of their home. Note that kitchen spaces are generally small in Paris
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- We talked to commuters on their way home about the daily grocery shopping habits.
User Persona
We developed user personas to anchor who are our target users. Having a constant reference helps us avoid feature creep and focus on their needs.
Martin and Marie
Martin and Marie are a young French couple that has recently moved in together in the center of Paris with different dietary restrictions navigating how to cook for one another. Martin (a 28 year-old avid meat-eater) and Marie (a 26 year-old picky flexitarian) both cook dinner and go grocery shopping every day but now must learn how to only prepare one meal that they can both enjoy.
Needs to accomplish…
- Figure out what to cook for both their partner and themselves
- Grocery shop for their daily meal
- Cook a recipe that fits dietary restrictions
Needs to feel…
- Not overwhelmed
- Happy with their partner
- Full of food
- Empowered to navigate the kitchen and grocery stores
Considerations
- Where can they figure out what recipe to make?
- How can they know if the store has the ingredients they’re looking for?
- How do users know if they are skilled enough to make the dish?
Journey Mapping
A journey map helps us identify key moments and feelings in the food experience from inspiration to shopping to cooking to cleaning to storing. This map also help share our understanding with our team members and stakeholders.
We learned that grocery shoppers’ diets usually change dramatically after childbirth, moving in with a significant other, and when new health restrictions arise. However, resources to determine what to do with this information is scattered between doctors, friends, online resources, mobile applications, and family members. Millennials in dietary transition periods aspire to easily identify ingredients that can be used for meals because of their fewer options and greater risks. After our research, we came up with a main user case:
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- Marie and Martin have different dietary needs and they both switch off who cooks every night.
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- Resources about food are often scattered across apps, magazines, websites, and doctors.
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- The supermarket offers so many options, choice overload makes it difficult to figure out what to eat.
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- Cooking new recipes are often difficult.
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- Both the cook and the people are unhappy with the meal because of the ingredients or how the meal turned out.
Pain Points
For our persona, we identified key stages during their food experience and their emotional state during each stage of the journey to help find opportunities to change for the better.
Navigating this space as a young adult is daunting and often leaves people feeling overwhelmed by the wealth of information and unable to make the best decisions. Thus, we find that people settle for what works and fall into archetypal eating behaviors to minimize their decision fatigue.
We found that there seems to be a large disconnect between having the inspiration to cook a meal and gathering the necessary ingredients, obtaining the recipe, and following through the preparation.
Oftentimes, people are inspired by online recipes, quick feast-your-eyes recipe videos on social media, or even delicious food documentaries, but lose motivation in following through with these recipes. Based on user interviews, this loss in motivation can be attributed to various stages of the food experience curve ranging from finding ingredients, purchasing materials, storing, and even cooking.
Ideating & Forming Hypotheses
We formulated hypotheses – statements that theorize how the world works – to test to help further our ideas about the users, problem space, user needs, and plausible solutions.
To explore more into this idea of the disconnect between inspiration and painful shopping experience, we opted to prototype a dark-horse idea, in which we approach an “out there” idea that isn’t expected to work, but aims to give insights to our user. The focus of our dark horse prototype is about creating an interaction between users and their food choices.
Hypothesis:
By giving users an active suggestion system while they shopped, users would be more likely to find recipes and ingredients that fit their dietary needs and reduce the stress of figuring out what to eat.
Storyboarding
I use the storyboard to highlight key tasks and feelings of the prototype during the inspiration and shopping stages of the food experience.
We started to test the hypothesis by obtaining qualitative feedback through a critical experience prototype. One idea was to have a shelf of goods that would detect what ingredients or food items users would choose and then suggest recipe or ingredient additions based on their choices. Having this in the store or pantry would easily integrate it into the routine of people’s shopping and having suggestions for the user would help ease the difficulties of deciding what to cook or eat.
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- "What can I make that Marie and I will both like?"
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- "I know we like this ingredient and I've used it before, so I'll pick this one."
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- "I've never tried these other ingredients, but if they go well for this recipe with my first ingredient, then I'll try it."
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- "I've got all my ingredients quickly and I can't wait to try this recipe for Marie!"
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- "I feel more confident about what to make for both of us!"
The storyboard aligns the vision amongst the team as well as identify key issues and touchpoints needed for the prototype.
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- Storyboard helped discuss potential issues due to the environment beyond features isolated to the interface.
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- We identified key touchpoints required to move the user along in our storyboard.
1-Week Prototype & Qualitative Testing
Low-fi prototype is used to quickly test under budget if the product addresses the core basic need of the user and the truth of our hypothesis.
We manufactured a low-fidelity prototype out of cardboard boxes, a projector, paper, and a script in order to test if this experience would work.
Users were recruited from a local university by setting up the prototype near a cafeteria and campus shop. We briefed testers with the context that they are shopping for a meal and an overview of the product.
Early qualitative feedback from users identified areas that could potentially create a more interactive experience, adding features such as instructions, recipe titles, video recipe views, and recipe receipt print-outs. Although it may seem intuitive to just pick items off the shelf, it really makes a difference in user interaction and streamlining by adding the phrase “Start by picking up an item.”
Qualitative testing helped advise UX features that are expected by users or even enhance the food experience during shopping. Additionally, feedback gave insights directly to our hypothesis.
Key Ideas:
- Control groups were having trouble finding inspiration for what meal to make when shopping without any recipe suggestion.
- Control groups were inspired by one ingredient and continued building the shopping list from that first ingredient, which seemed like a linear thought process.
- Experimental group would be more willing to try ingredients they have not used before if it was a suggested ingredient.
- Users liked the interactive aspect of the smart-shelf and played with it by removing items off and putting items back on the shelf.
- Some users mentioned that they did not care for the physical aspect of the grocery shelf.
Quantitative Research
Our users were excited about this new idea of being able to actively shop through the experience, but this was not enough data to go from believing this is what users wanted to knowing that this is what users want. Our next user testing steps focused on addressing questions through measurable data such as:
- How many more items on average did a shopper select with the interactive experiences than shopper with a regular experience?
- How much time did a shopper spend on either experience?
- What items were chosen more in each experience?
- How many times did a shopper select an unfamiliar recipe with the new suggestion system?
We set up multiple testing points to present an ingredient suggestion system, such as a purely digital interface versus a physical interface. With quantitative data, we were able to bridge a gap between our observations of the users’ feelings and their actions.
We were able to collect data by timing the user’s time on each ‘screen’ during their shopping experience, counting the number each item was taken, and also surveying users after their experience. Although surveys are qualitative, we were able to codify them to categories.
Key Ideas:
- More familiar (and usually common) ingredients on the main screen was selected more often than specialty ingredients as a starting point.
- Shoppers spent less time going through the experience when given instructions on how to navigate the interactive experience. (1. Pick an item, 2. Choose a recipe, etc.)
- Shoppers on average spent 5 more minutes in the interactive experiences than the control groups, often putting items back when they were suggested recipes they were uninterested in.
- Shoppers on average chose 2 more ingredients on the interactive experiences than the control groups.
As fun and interactive the users quipped about our initial prototype, the data showed that the experience was causing users to spend more time playing with the ingredients rather than addressing their needs for a recipe.
This prototype helped identify areas where we could streamline an experience like this in the grocery shopping experience by adding cues and instructions. It also identified the shopping distraction that a recipe suggestion system could have had it been integrated throughout the shelves of a store.
How our early prototypes educated our high-fi prototype
High-fidelity prototypes establishes a more realistic experience for usability testing and encouraging useful stakeholder feedback.
Fast-forward to our later prototype, where we transitioned into an interactive grocery shelf that aims to create a personalized user experience that allows individuals to find recipes that suited their recently-changed dietary needs more easily. These are products that can be more realistically implemented in a grocery store. Below are some product features that were driven by design decisions from our earlier prototypes.
The inspiration for our user needs to happen in the store to reduce loss of motivation when finding recipes. The recipe selection needed to be simple for users to integrate this into their shopping experience. Here is an updated user flow.
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- User enters the store, looking for inspiration on what to cook tonight.
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- UI has a direct call-to-action for people that aren't sure what to make.
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- Users selects an ingredients that inspire them.
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- User is shown ingredients that go well together while incompatible ingredients are faded.
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- User can find recipes that utilize the ingredients they want to use.
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- Additionally, dietary preferences can be selected as well. Vegetarian is the only option at the moment.
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- Informing users what the next stages are.
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- User is prompted if they want a custom spice mix
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- Recipe receipt with in-store ingredient location
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- Spices are dispensed for the user before they continue their shopping
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- Nestle ingredients related to the recipe are ready-for-pick-up on the shelf
Key Learnings
When we ask someone if this is the right experience, the user may say one thing, but when you observe their behavior, there may be a discrepancy between the two. It is imperative in UX design that we be as objective as we can to better understand the user and how to improve the overall experience.
Qualitative research is a great way to develop hypotheses about our understanding of the user and the world. On the other hand quantitative research can test our hypotheses with data to back up our findings.
Overall, this project has been a great experience as an introduction to product design in industry. I think being able to tackle problems that are human-centric are the most rewarding since they focus on unique human interaction. Being able to venture through the design process for a half-year and having the time to user test and iterate my project was also an excellent opportunity that most class projects do not offer. It helped better my understanding about the time, effort, and refinement that industry-related projects need. Additionally, the project was in the food industry, which I had never worked in before, so it was exciting to be able to tap into professionals and explore another space.