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ChefQuest

 

How can we turn cooking into a fun, distanced social experience during the quarantine?

BRIEF:

  • ChefQuest is a prototype of a gameified cooking app designed to make learning cooking skills/recipes a fun and social experience for the Foodie Community during the COVID quarantine. 

  • This was a 10 week group project for my CMPM 131: User Experience course.

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CHALLENGES:

  • This was my first time doing a UX Design project and it was a fun challenge to coordinate it all remotely.

  • I learned important lessons about team communication and got a taste first hand at the many levels of decision-making that comes with app design.

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OUTCOMES:

  • The end result was a high fidelity prototype of a cooking app with game elements like questlines, badges, and challenges, which turns learning cooking skills into a game. 

  • Made using: Adobe XD, Miro Board, Proto.io, Figma

    • following User Research Procedure of: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Evaluate & Iterate

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Who even are Foodies?
     Our assignment prompt was to design a digital product that addressed a quarantine-based need of a specific community. The community our group was assigned was 'Foodies'. Our first challenge was defining who even constituted as a foodie.

With COVID and quarantine mandates in place, people were generally discouraged to go out and eat food. In order to reduce the spread of COVID, people have been encouraged to limit their contact with others, so some have chosen not to order delivery or takeout. A survey by QSR Magazine on 1000 US customers March 13, 2020 shows that around 25% of Americans (~roughly 800 million) say they will definitely avoid eating out during the COVID19 pandemic.

We decided to define Foodie as: “people who don’t normally cook but want to learn how to cook”. In particular to COVID, people who typically eat out or have food cooked for them and because of the quarantine are challenged with cooking from home. 

From this we generate a description of Core User Attributes that all our ideal users should have: 

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Then we created five different User Personas to better understand different user needs and pain points when learning how to cook. 

01: EMPATHIZE

01: Empathize

02: DEFINE

What are the barriers towards learning to cook during the pandemic? 
     To better understand pain points for our user's point of view, we conducted 10 30-minute interviews with our target audience. After hearing from our primary and secondary sources, we found that the main problem our design should solve is the lack of motivation and mental barriers people have towards cooking.  At at high level, we discovered that a large reason people avoid learning how to cook is because they are intimidated by the many factors that cooking entails (ie. Accessibility of ingredients, clean-up, time, portion sizing...etc)
 

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As a team, we decided to make a cooking app that entertaining for user and seeks to create a different perspective of looking at cooking.

We hoped it would entice people who don’t know how to cook to overcome their barriers towards cooking and try something new. So, we made a storyboard of how our potential cooking app would fit into the life of a user.
 

02: Define

03: IDEATE

How to invite someone into their own kitchen?? 
     Next, our team conducted a competitive analysis of different types of cooking apps.
 

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Out of the ideas our team had brainstormed, we liked the idea of a Gamified Cooking App (A) and a Minimalist Recipe App (B) best. We made to low-fi wireframes of design A & B and asked a potential user to compare:

  • How intuitive is Design A/B?​​

  • What do you like about Design A/B?

  • What do you find difficult about Design A/B?

  • What features would improve the utility of Design A/B?

 

We learned that users appreciated the simplicity from the Minimalist Recipe App and found it more suited to people who already knew their way around the kitchen. They found the game aspect new and intriguing, but thought the badge feature was unnecessary and overcomplicated the app. They suggested use of icons, especially for ingredients as well as adding a speech input/voice commands system to make interacting easier when people are cooking.  Furthermore, a game cooking idea might not take on unless there is a social aspect, but otherwise it seems like fun way to get into cooking and document progress.

From our feedback, our team decided to take on the challenge of bringing gaming into cooking. Our solution to integrating gamification with cooking was largely inspired by fitness/exercise apps like Fitbit. We understood that learning to cook is a very individual activity and no app we make would make beginners want to cook. The most we could do was to create a  fun and playful invitation to step into the kitchen.

04: PROTOTYPE

Making it happen 
     Unlike most cooking apps, ChefQuest prioritizes learning of desired kitchen skills over access to different recipes. We decided to categorize cooking skills into questlines and implement a challenge and achievement system. Through the quest system, users can set their priorities of what skills they want to master. Their quest selection will filter the recipes recommended to them and also provide a definite goal for users. Furthermore the weekly challenge of cooking x amount of meals a week will keep the user accountable to their cooking goals and hopefully help them integrate cooking into their lifestyle.

The recipe portion of the app draws from generic recipe apps where the user can search for recipes and click on their desired recipe to learn more. Instructions and steps are provided along with a video so both audio and visual components are accessible. Our app also has a voice-over and screen on option which can be accessed in the settings. This allows the user to use the app while they cook with the app seamlessly.

03: Ideate
04: Prototype

05: Evaluate & ITERATE

User testing 
 We tested our design with 15 users and asked them demographic and interview questions surrounding:

  • Overall experience (Enjoyability, Intuitiveness, Ease of Navigation, Areas of Confusion)

  • Gamification Aspect (How does Questline/Badge/Skills Feature impact to users Motivation)

  • Suitability to lifestyle (would they use it? easy to cook and use app at the same time?)

  • Impact (How does experience with this app change the difficulty of cooking?)

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Our demographic survey results show that only 6 participants out of 15 cook more than 7 meals a week. However, 13 out of 15 participants are interested in learning to cook/improve their cooking. This shows that people want to cook more, but there is some friction in the learning process that can come in the form of: not knowing where to start, not having enough time, or not having fun cooking.

Based on the feedback, people tended to be confused by the gamified aspects of our application because they were disjointed and not necessarily connected together (quests, badges, skills). We believe that we could iterate upon our current design by designing a more quest-centric game system where each part of the system is woven together with a more clear objective.

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After looking at the feedback, I redesigned the homepage to deliver a stronger game feel by using a cook avatar. I made badges and skills less of a focus by reducing them to icons. I simplified the navigation bar and brought the quest line, challenges, and recipe search options to the forefront of the design. We didn't have the time to test our new design, but I think it communicates the goal of our app much better. 

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Before:

After:

Learnings

My Takeaways 
     At the end, it seemed that the goal of our app, to gamify cooking was not initially successful. Although we include quests, challenges, and badges, the functionality of the app did not support a game-like experience. I think this might have been because we did not translate the goal of leveling up the character/user and engaging in quests with the real life experience of cooking. On a positive note, users reported that they did like the design concept and would be interested in using something like it to improve their cooking.

I learned that one important aspect of games is that they create community around a fun activity. If we had more time, I think I would have focused more on making those opportunity for user engagement and really hone in on the social potential a gamified cooking app could provide. Options such as being able to post the dish they made, have a photo library of their cooking, and chat with other users.

  • To see the prototype, download the .zip file and run 'frame.html' here ->

  • Kudos to Instructor: Jared Duval

  • Kudos to group members: Andy L., Jongwoo P., Rohan I., Sravya V. 

05: Evaluate
ChefQuest Learnings
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