Savr is a five-day design sprint challenge which help Savr Recipes, a new startup company, to develop an app for users to cook new recipes without hesitation.

My Role

  • Research analysis

  • UX design development

  • Wireframing and prototyping

  • UI high-fidelity design

  • User testing

Day 1: User Research & Mapping

Where to look at?

Everyone loves good food, however, not everyone knows how to cook. From what we had found through user interviews and comments, we discovered some negative feedback towards the app with difficulties in the following:

  1. Users feel frustrated about going back and forth with their phones in between each cooking step. 

  2. Users are also confused about steps in written form without knowing what it is supposed to look like, especially when specific skills or techniques are required. 

  3. On the other hand, most of the users tend to have all ingredients and kitchenware prepared before cooking in order to have a better idea of time estimation and expected workload.

By summarising all the user problems, I began looking for possible solutions by creating a basic end-to-end user experience:

 Day 2-3: Solution sketching

Lightning demos

To get inspirations for a better product solution, I did some research on relevant competitors with similar products and gathered some insights:

  • Clearer time estimation can be shown by separating the preparation time and actual cooking time

  • Ingredient and kitchenware checklists help users to manage expectations and what to get before cooking. 

  • Video tutorials are more user-friendly especially to beginners so that they can know exactly how to complete the step and what exactly everything should look like. 

  • It is more convenient to help adjust the portion needed according to the number of servings.

 Crazy 8’s

From there, I further polished the critical screens and developed different panels of storyboards to lay out most of the screens, following the red route of the app where users follow steps to complete cooking a selected dish.

I began figuring out the best solution by selecting the most critical screen, which is the step-by-step instruction screen.

Among all eight sketches, I chose the second sketch (circled in red) the best where it helps users to maintain hand-free from following the recipes while cooking through video with timer function.

 Day 4: Prototyping

Hi-fidelity prototype

 Day 5: User Testing

Work as expected!

On the last day of the design sprint, I invited five different people to conduct a usability test in order to make sure my design is built based on users’ needs.

While most of the users are satisfied with the solution, there are some changes that can be done for further development:

  1. Overall font size can be slightly bigger for better reading. 

  2. The icon of the Grocery button is not clear enough for users to identify.

Conclusion 

The overall experience of the five day design sprint not only pushes me to work faster in such a tight timeframe, it also helps me to learn to focus on creating a better solution without putting too much focus on making it “perfect”. After all, UX/UI design is meant to create solutions that can actually enhance user experience along with visual pleasure.