Chop Chop: Making Cooking and Grocery Shopping easier for College Students

Brief:

Eva Kretsinger-Walters and I had the job of designing an app that would create a way for college students to cook quick and easy meals for their busy schedules. Working in Forge’s UX Design program we generated a solution using the following steps.

Problem Statement:

How might we design a way for college students to cook quick and easy meals for their busy schedule?

So with our problem statement in mind we set out to learn more about these busy schedules college students have. What would be the most useful to this population.

User Research

A challenge for Eva and I was avoiding designing for ourselves. As college students we fit the population this app was designed for so we had to leave our personal biases at the door, even if this app was to be designed for people like us.

We created a survey where we asked a range of questions to gather some key statistics on the users. What was stopping them from cooking? This was a great resource for finding our users pain points.

We also conducted five directed interviews where we learned a lot more about our potential users. Again we started from a blank slate point, asking the most basic questions at first in an attempt to really understand the user from a basic level first.

Some of the quotes we heard were,

Sometimes it’s cheaper to eat out. Going to the store and getting all the necessary ingredients is too expensive. Cooking for myself everyday is too expensive

I hate spending money on an ingredient I may never use again

The verdict was clear: because college students have limited resources, they avoid investing time and money into potentially unsuccessful recipes. Their inexperience meal-prepping was particularly burdensome; college students did not know how to maximize their grocery shopping to spend the least amount of money and use all their ingredients.

This user research also helped us make a realization about our problem statement. College students do not know how to efficiently grocery shop which makes cooking for themselves more expensive than it should be, in some cases even more expensive than eating out.

We needed to teach college students how to effectively grocery shop before there was even potential for them to cook for themselves.

Wireframe:

The solution? We decided to design an app that emphasized meal-prepping and cooking skills. We wanted students to be able to input their existing ingredients and receive a ready-made meal plan for the week, catered to their individual preferences. In addition, we wanted our app to teach the principles of cooking: why are students doing what they are doing when they cook? What is the purpose of salting water for boiling noodles, or adding lemon juice to salad dressing? An understanding of the fundamentals of cooking would catalyze students’ learning and thus, their ability to cook satisfying meals.

With this mission in mind we came up with the following wire frames.

We wanted a simple home page with options for the user that were just a touch away.

Mockups:

For our design we created a design language board that had our color scheme, our logo, and our font with sizes. We thought about the color psychology a good amount before ultimately deciding.

We went with orange because we thought it fit the functionality of the app. We wanted to create an app where people could come to quickly make food. We thought orange worked well for this because orange gives out energy and is used to create a sense of immediacy and spontaneity, the exact way we hope the app makes our users feel.

Usability Testing:

While our product felt like a finished one, it is never complete until you can see how the users navigate the app and make changes when needed.

We had users preform a series of tasks, beginning a recipe, saving a recipe and making a meal prep plan for the week to see how seamlessly the navigation of Chop Chop actually was.

Some of the feedback we received was:

• “I would like a way to edit the meal prep plan to fit my schedule”
• “Emphasize color contrast in the save recipe button”
• “The pages look similar, maybe a bit of differentiation could help”

We took this valuable information and made some quick changes that really benefit the user.

Takeaways:

College students want to cook for themselves. College students also are quite bad at grocery shopping in a fashion that allows them to save money on their food.

For us to get college students cooking more we had to make grocery shopping and planning for the week easier. Through our app we provide a way for those ingredients that sit in your pantry for months after making some interesting recipe to no longer go to waste.

There are many pain points when it comes to cooking but we had to focus on the most prevalent ones, time and grocery shopping woes.

College students need this guidance. I know as a college student myself I am not the best grocery shopper and would find this app incredibly useful.