Since the coronavirus pandemic started, consumers have settled into routines that involve a lot more home cooking, and studies suggest these habits will continue after the pandemic. Because of people spend more time cooking at home, studies suggest that ‘cooking fatigue’ has become a problem.

After conducting desk research, I started user interviews to help me have a better understanding of the problem. I interviewed around 6 users of different ages and backgrounds to better understand their cooking habits and opinions.

My questions focus on 3 areas:
1. Daily cooking routines
2. Learning new recipes
3. Sharing recipes with others

After conducting my interviews, I got a lot of great insights through the conversations, so with affinity mapping, I color-coded patterns and outliers 6 focus areas to synthesizing all the insights.

After creating the affinity mapping, I found out that there are lots of common opinions among interviewees. For example, sharing recipes with others can help encourage users to cook more.

By concluding the findings and insights gathered from the research and interview, I further build these 3 how might we statement to lead my design direction:
1. How might we make cooking more efficient?
2. How might we help users share their cooking experience?
3. How might we make cooking a more engaging and fun experience?

I first started to sketch out the key features I want to have for the app, which includes a social page for users to learn and share recipes and a fast and efficient way to create their own recipes.

Based on the initial sketches, I then built low-fidelity prototypes to test on users and explore more possible features and solutions to improve my design.

After testing the low-fidelity prototype, I gathered all the new feedbacks which helped me figure out what features to cancel, which features I needed to add, and combine some features together. I created more detailed prototypes to better visualize how the product will function.

By testing the Mid-Fi prototype and gather all those insights from user testing allowed me to take a step back, and reassess what my product should look like, and how it should work. To have a better understanding of the app flow, I sketched out the system map to have a birds-eye view of how the product would work.

I also created a service blueprint to help me assess how the product would interact between the user and all the potential backstage actions.

For a cooking app, I went for bright colors and choose yellow as the main color to bring excitement to the users. For the typeface, I choose Recoleta as display typeface combines with different sizes of a single wight of Facundo to create hierarchy.