CookWithMi
A Mobile companion designed to personalise a learning experience to motivate young adults to develop positive cooking habits and skills.
Project Overview
Disciplines
Lean UX
UI Design
User Research
Tools
Figma
Miro
Trello
As part of my Interaction Design capstone project, I led the end-to-end design process within a team of six to conceptualise, research, and develop a minimum viable product (MVP) aimed at reimagining learning leveraging interaction design and technology.
User Research
Conducted research to define the problem, gathered user insights, and tested prototype feasibility through usability studies.
UI/UX Design
Developed the UI by translating UX insights into intuitive design solutions, ensuring a user-centered approach.
Prototyping
Created an interactive prototype to streamline product testing and developer hand over.
The Problem
Currently, there are no accessible solutions in the market designed to teach cooking skills effectively, leaving beginner cooks overwhelmed by complex instructions. This discourages learning, reduces confidence, and leads to increased reliance on convenience foods and higher food waste. There is a clear need for a simple, beginner-friendly solution that empowers users to build cooking skills gradually, fostering personal growth and confidence over time.
Lean UX
Project Goals
01
Teach beginner cooks to become more comfortable in the kitchen by learning various cooking skills and building their cooking habits.
02
Create a straightforward path towards developing long-term learning habits and fostering constant improvement.
03
Make the user feel rewarded and help them track their progression.
04
Provide a wide range of lessons for different cooking skill levels.
Define
Exploring the Problem Space
To identify a meaningful problem space and explore new ways to enhance learning through technology, we began with a group brainstorming session to generate a broad range of ideas.
We explored how technology could support beginners in learning to cook. Our brainstorming session focused on identifying key challenges in learning new skills and mapping out different ways digital tools might help. Rather than defining a fixed solution, we used this phase to generate assumptions and themes to investigate further in our research.
Managing Stress and Improving Mental Health
The first was a platform focused on managing life stressors through meditation, yoga, and reflection, which was highly relevant during the pandemic but required extensive research to address mental health effectively.
Enhancing study habits outside the classroom
The second was a platform to enhance students’ study habits outside the classroom, which was deemed too complex and broad in scope for the project’s timeframe. Both ideas were set aside to focus on a more feasible and targeted solution.
Defining the problem area
After refining our direction and evaluating various possibilities using a bold vs. safe matrix, we narrowed our focus to exploring how technology could support beginners in learning to cook. This approach helped us assess the feasibility and impact of different directions, ensuring that we remained focused on understanding user needs and challenges as we moved forward with our research.
Define
Discovering User Needs through a Macro environment analysis.
The percentage of men and women that have started to cook has increased overall from 2003 to 2016
The percent of college-educated men cooking increased from 37.9% in 2003 to 51.9%. College-educated women who cook increased from 64.7% in 2003 to 68.7% in 2016.
There has been a growing push for consumers to adopt healthier choices and lifestyles, with a rising demand for organic and fresh produce.
The number of Australians aged 13-24 increased their time spent online with food and cooking.
There was a 71% increase in time spent on online food and cooking websites.
Increase confidence and motivation to cook
Provide an easy and intuitive lesson delivery that is valuable and rewarding.
Prevent food wastage
Create a community for user's who all have the same mindset in wanting to learn and get better. This will increase motivation and confidence.
Encourage home cooking and reducing the need to order takeout.
Encouraging users to save money by ordering less takeout.
Build lifelong skills and facilitate personal growth
Personalised and accessible learning experience to cater to the users learning style.
Based on the three main product features, there were no direct competitor as it was combination of three key markets.
Traditional Recipe Site
Cooking Tutorial Video Content
Ingredient Tracking and Recipe Suggester
Competitor Profiles
Feature Matrix
Survey
To gain a deeper understanding of the problem area, a Google survey was conducted to explore young people’s attitudes towards cooking, eating out, and factors preventing them from cooking. The survey also aimed to uncover feelings about their cooking skills, concerns around food waste, and interest in improving their culinary abilities. This helped define the target audience and identify key issues, providing valuable insights to guide the design process.
From the 12 participants we found 3 key insights:
25%
Only 25% of participants were certain they had the right cooking skills.
100%
All young adults were interested in improving their cooking skills.
Motivation, time and skill are the highest factors preventing young adults from cooking.
Define
Defining the problem
How might we….
How might we make cooking an interesting daily activity for young adults so that they're motivated to learn real world skills?
Problem Statement
Many young adults struggle to build good learning habits and retain essential skills, particularly in cooking. The initial learning process can be daunting, leading to a lack of confidence and motivation to continue. Additionally, different learning styles make it difficult to commit skills to memory, resulting in forgotten basics needed for personal growth. This often leads beginners to rely on eating out or frozen meals, contributing to food waste from unused ingredients.
Design
Exploring Solutions
Low-fidelity Prototype
Guided by insights from our user research and collaborative brainstorming sessions, I translated our ideas into low-fidelity sketches. These sketches incorporated key features like personalised learning, an ingredients checklist, and recipe suggestions, ensuring the design addressed the main pain points and motivations for learning to cook. This stage allowed us to visualise potential solutions and iterate quickly.
Define
Pivoting to focus on Enhancing Learning and Skill Development.
Hypotheses, Competitor and Prototype Revision
After receiving feedback on our low-fidelity prototype and further brainstorming sessions, we decided to pivot our idea as our initial statement did not focus enough on learning but on showing users recipes. Thus we decided to focus on teaching users cooking skills and building good learning habits.
Rather than having sources of recipe demonstrations being a competitor, we found that our solution is more similar to skill development websites and apps and memory brain training sites. Through this research, we also found that no products in the market catered for teaching cooking skills online through a mobile application.
Design
Prototyping Interactions to Refine Usability and Flow.
Mid-fidelity Prototype
After making some changes to our low-fi prototype, Using our new low-fi prototype and task flow diagrams, I developed the mid-fi prototype to digitise our solution, including the essential UI elements and fundamental application interactions.
Validate
Designing With a Human-Centred Approach.
Heuristic Analysis / Key Negative findings and Recommendations
Gaining Insights to Drive User-Centric Decisions
User Field Study
After synthesising usability and heuristic feedback from our user field study, we conducted a lean affinity mapping session to uncover additional pain points, identify new opportunities, and categorise key issues.
This process allowed us to:
Validate key user assumptions to ensure our app aligns with actual user expectations and workflows.
Gain a deeper understanding of our persona by analysing real user behaviours, motivations, and challenges within the context of the solution.
Identify overlooked issues and pain points that should be refined in the high-fidelity phase.
Prioritise issues based on frequency and severity to ensure we focus on the most critical improvements before advancing to hi-fi designs.
Interview Findings
Across the field of study of 12 people, analysis was undertaken to form five refined affinity diagram to revel four unique themes that affect our persona when it comes to learning to cook.
Technology
Food Preference
Motivation
Learning Style
Define
Refining the Experience – Iterating Based on Final Testing Insights
Revisions and Changes based on the Field Study
With keeping our brainstormed desired business outcome, user outcome and persona for our MVP in mind we developed recommendations to improve our app.
Based on the field study research final adjustments to our hypotheses and competitor profile by adding and removing features to better cater to user needs.
Final Hypotheses and Competitor Profile
Hypotheses
Competitor Profile
Memory Brain Training SItes
Skill Development Platforms
Cooking Video Content
Revised Scenario & Key User Goals
As a result a revised user scenario and three key user goals were made according to the thematic analysis findings and recommendations. Which in turn was used to to set the basis of the task flow to be made into the MVP and Hi Fidelity Prototype.
Scenario
Vincent, stuck in the house and wants to learn the lifelong skill of cooking but realizes he doesn’t know where to start. Vincent picks up his phone and downloads “Cook With Mi”.
Key User Goals
The user should be able to sign up to “Cook with Mi” and choose desired learning style and land on the home page.
The user should be able to access and complete the “knife hold” skill from the explore page and return to completed skill page.
Users should be able to go to community centre page, read the feed by notable “Cook with Mi” members and post a note.
User flow
Based on the Key user goals 3 user flows were created as the main features to be showcased through the MVP.
The Solution
MVP and Key Features
After conducting heuristic analyses and user interviews, I played a key role in implementing the insights gained to enhance the UI and elevate it to a higher fidelity, bringing it closer to the final product.
For the MVP, I was involved in the development of several key features: a Learning page to continue lessons and track progress, an Explore page for filtering and finding lessons, a Community page for creating a community of beginner cooks to motivate and increase confidence in the kitchen, Learning pages for a structured learning experience catering to the varying learning styles, and a Profile page for tracking personal stats and progress. My work encompassed not only the design and visual aspects but also ensuring that the user experience was aligned with user feedback and research findings.
Learning Quiz
Users have unified access and usability for learning types.
Give users the option to choose the learning style and then take the learning quiz if unsure.
Accessibility
Users have a supported hands-off technology learning cooking experience.
Voice assistance.
Auto-playing of videos and speaker capabilities.
Video closed-captions.
Community
Motivate, increase confidence and seek additional learning skills.
Posting on community group with questions and queries, professional experts and users responding with support.
A community group of publishers post success stories and videos showing progress and skill.
Encourages users to motivate each other during their cooking journey.
Explore Cooking Lessons
Users can learn their preferred skills.
Filter options for the explore page.
Wide range selection of skills and recipes.
Badges and XP
Users are rewarded for personal learning and supported with their individual learning habits.
Rewards users with badges, points and a personal "experience (XP) " bar with every skill learnt to encourage continuous learning.
Post lesson review
User can measure their learning success.
Ability to capture a photo of the results to share and reflect on learnt skills.
Post-work notes allow users to reflect and write about their experiences learning a new skill.
Outcomes & Retrospective
The final version of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), was well-received and effectively addressed the problem. I worked collaboratively with the team, continuously refining my designs and prototype based on ongoing research, feedback, and test results.
Through this process, I learned how to apply UX principles in a lean, agile design environment. The constant cycle of defining, designing, and validating created an iterative process of continuous improvement. This approach allowed me to stay user-centred ensuring constant enhancement of both the product’s usability and its impact.
Project considerations
Providing a truely personalised learning experience.
While the app allowed users to interact with lessons based on their learning style, I would have preferred a more personalised approach, where the content and interactions are tailored to each user.
Conduct post design testing.
While the MVP and design process were reviewed by an industry panel, post-design testing through usability testing and user interviews would have been valuable to assess how well the MVP addressed research findings and its effectiveness in solving user pain points and supporting the learning-to-cook experience.
Gaining insights earlier in the design process
The field study and affinity diagraming was conducted midway through the design process provided valuable insights into how young adults learn and use technology in the kitchen. While these insights would have been more beneficial earlier to clarify the problem and allow time for solution validation and iteration, it ultimately helped us to identify potential user needs that may have been missed initially.