Based on our first interview with Andy, we knew that our target demographic would be

• relatively young (18-30 years old)
• on a budget
• looking for ways to connect
• wanting to reduce food waste
• a beginner/novice home cook

To address our client’s vision and pain points, we conducted a "How Might We" exercise to help decide as a team what our main solutions were going to be. We based our plan around the following:

• allow users to chat while they cook, whether it’s through text, audio, or video
• include simple recipes that are easy to follow and execute
• give users the ability to enter and save ingredients they have, and to search for recipes based on those ingredients

Here we see Linda, a proto-persona created based on what Andy told us about the expected target audience in the first interview. This empathy map helped to take some of the abstract ideas we had about potential users and make them more concrete and relatable.

We also created this journey map for Linda, which was made to help shape the group’s idea of how users might interact with our prototype.

Next we created a screener survey to find usability testers. The results showed that most of our respondents were fairly close to the target demographic. Most importantly, this group of respondents also told us that they enjoy cooking with friends.

Based on our initial solution explorations, and on responses from our survey, we created a list of user stories. Here are some user stories we decided to include:

• searching for recipes
• inputting ingredients
• chatting with friends

Some of the user stories we omitted:

• choosing cuisine categories
• sharing out to other social media platforms

These stories were omitted due to time constraints, and because they did not solve the most important problems.

The full list and details can be seen here →

Next, we all created sketches of user stories mapped out into a flow. These sketches were primarily based on actions listed in the journey map. As a group we provided several different options for potential flows and solutions that could be applied to the initial wireframes.

We performed sketching exercises like “Crazy 8’s” and “4-ups” to narrow down common ideas we thought would serve users best. We critiqued one another, gathered feedback, and were able to come to a consensus about features we wanted to include and how we wanted them displayed.

‍After sketching, we created some digital wireframes. Our first two wireframes included two search bars, but after getting some feedback we realized that this was confusing. We combined them into one search bar and added some detail to the featured recipes. We also increased the recognition of the bottom navbar icons to lead users to their friends’ cooking activity and the chat feature. In the last iteration, we added more details and made all elements consistent and iOS compliant.

Our research team decided to conduct both moderated and unmoderated testing on our prototype. This was done for two reasons: to yield as much testing data as possible, and to get experience using a new research tool. For both tests, the research team chose five tasks to test on:

• Creating an account and viewing your profile
• Finding a recipe from the homepage
• Choosing ingredients to start a recipe search
• Starting a chat with a friend
• Finding saved recipes

The results from this showed that in general this prototype was easy to navigate, but some features like the "Kitchen" section were confusing.
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A full test script, notes, and analysis of the moderated tests can be seen here →

From the 11 unmoderated tests we conducted through Maze.design, we were able to gather several useful analytics like success rate, bounce rates, heat maps, and more. The results of these tests were, frankly, lackluster. One of our tasks had users give up on it 75% of the time. It’s a bit unclear whether these results were due to the wording of the task questions or the tasks themselves, but ultimately they reinforced the notion that there are some user flows that need updating.

After collecting user feedback, as a team we decided upon what should be included in future iterations of this project. Those updates include the following:

• Make the social aspect of the app more apparent
• Combine the list and category view within the Kitchen page
• Add more ways to share recipes out to social media
• Add more ways to login (Google, Apple, etc.)
• Add an onboarding process
• Increase clickable areas for icons and links as needed

We created a low-fidelity prototype that our client was very happy with, and that people seem to enjoy navigating. The UI is simple, clean, iOS compliant, and makes good use of Gestalt principles to ensure that a more built out, stylized version of the app will be enjoyable to use. Accessibility and usability were of the utmost importance throughout the project, and we based all of our decisions on best practices. The split screen chat feature was a hit.

There are several improvements to be made: most of our test participants got hung up at some point, so it is clear that some iterating needs to be done in regards to our user flow. Our next steps hope to address those issues.

The scope of NomNom could use some re-definition. Several users were a bit confused as to what the point of this app is. By adding more prevalent chat features throughout the app, we hope to address that problem and reflect our understanding of what this app could do and what needs it could fulfill.

Personally, I learned so much about working on a UX team. Being my first experience like this, I had no idea what to expect. We had our hurdles, and dynamics weren’t always perfect, but we managed to come together to find solutions to our problems as they arose.