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.
Responsibilites
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 Process
Lean UX
This project was grounded in the Lean UX design process, focusing on rapid iteration, collaboration, and user-centred outcomes to develop a Minimum Viable Product. By continuously defining, designing, testing, and learning, we validated ideas early and refined them through real user feedback, prioritising adaptability and actionable insights over perfection.
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.
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.
DEFINE
Exploring the Problem Space
Brainstorming
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.
Ideas we discarded
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
Desktop Research
The percentage of men (14%) and women (4%) that have started to cook has increased overall from 2003 to 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 spending time online with food and cooking content increased, with a 71% rise in time spent on related websites.
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.
Hypotheses
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.
Competitor Analysis
Based on the three main product features, there were no direct competitor as it was combination of three key markets.
Competitor Profiles
Feature Matrix
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.
DEFINE
Pivoting to 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.
Sprint
Key Competitors
Hypotheses
Reason for change
Sprint 1
Traditional Recipe Site (Recipe.com, Epicurious)
Cooking Tutorial Video Content (Instagram Cooking pages, Youtube)
Ingredient Tracking Suggester ( Supercook, My Fridgefood.
Increase confidence and motivation to cook
Prevent food wastage
Encourage home cooking and reducing the need to order takeout.
Build lifelong skills and facilitate personal growth
Based on initial assumptions, with the focus of learning how to cook, reducing food wastage and encouraging home cooked-meals
Sprint 2
Memory Brain Training (Luminosity, Elevate-BrainTraining
Skill Development (Skill Share, Udemy)
Cooking Tutorial Video Content (Instagram Cooking pages, Youtube)
Increase motivation to continue to learn.
Reinforcing personal growth
Improving memory
Pivoted to skill development, and brain training rather than recipe content.
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.
THE SOLUTION
Developing Key Features and Enhancing User Experience Based on Insights
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.
EXPLORING 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
Users 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.
