Collaborators: Melanie Cho, Jessica Cho

Overview

Food is a luxury and eating healthy when you’re on a budget can be difficult. It’s easy to resort to fast, convenient food which often contains unhealthy fats, artificial ingredients and unnecessary preservatives. Learning how to cook takes time and making sure your fridge is full of healthy options isn’t an easy task. How might we provide healthy and quick food options for people on a budget?

INUF (pronounced “enough”) is a mobile application that suggests recipes utilizing the ingredients you have at home and adds items to your grocery list to create comprehensive meals.

People Problem

“As a single mom, I find it hard to make healthier food options for my kids and I. Because I work long shifts and I’m on a tight budget, it makes me feel like I’m not capable of giving my children all the nutrients from their meals. I want a product that can help me create healthy food in a timely manner without breaking the bank.”

Who is the User?

Families, college students, young professionals and anyone looking to prepare healthy meals using ingredients they have at home.

User Interview

We interviewed six individuals who:

• Cook at home in varying amounts

• Purchase processed and instant food regularly

• Prefer fast food over home-cooked meals

We interviewed different types of users: male and female, single and married, working professionals and stay at home parents and users with varying levels of cooking experience.

Here are a few pain points from my user interviews:

1. Users would rather eat unhealthy food for the sake of saving time

2. Time is money

3. Healthy food options are great but too expensive for everyone to access

4. Users need cost efficient food options

5. Sacrifices are necessary to incorporate a healthy lifestyle (i.e. Netflix subscription, Hulu subscription, etc.)

Brainstorming broad and bold ideas:

I started brainstorming by explore these questions:

1. How many meals do INUF users cook and buy every week?

2. What causes them to buy food and not cook?

3. How can we encourage users to cook more?

Narrowing and combining ideas:

Some of the common trends we found were:

• Users were on a budget and couldn’t afford to spend extra money on healthier food

• Users living alone always looked for a convenient and cheaper way to eat

• Users are looking for any new quick and easy recipes to cook

We knew the users were people who are working hard, but still living on a strict budget. We have those who don’t want to “cook for one.” And we have people who are tired of repeating meals and simply want to try something new. With this in mind, we created some personas to build an optimal INUF user.

INUF Users

Wireframes

In this stage, we started design this idea by drawing a rough sketch with some paper and pencil. we wanted to create a simple wireframe that was easy to understand and explain to others.

Usability Testing

We conducted a usability test to learn what works and what doesn’t with our design. We asked our participants to verbally explain their steps on each screen. Then we asked the participants a few questions to figure out if this product was useful to them.

During our usability testing, some of the issues were:

1. Users didn’t like having to login or make a new account

2. Users wanted to be able to edit some ingredients that didn’t belong to them such as housemates ingredients

3. Users want to pick and choose the types of recipes the app suggests

Some of the potential solutions were:

1. Having an incentive when making a new account or logging in

2. Adding a function that allows the user to delete any ingredients from the fridge

3. Allowing the user to filter cuisine preferences

Low Fidelity Design

We used Sketch to create a wireframe to demonstrate the flow of our design. It helped us visualize the navigation and know what needed to be improved for a better flow.

High Fidelity Design

Onboarding

Followed by the splash screen there will be a tutorial created to help users understand how to use this app. It’s split into three simple steps of SNAP, SHAKE and SAVOR.

1. SNAP will encourage the users to take pictures of the ingredients in their fridge and pantry

2. SHAKE will mix the ingredients and find recipes for the user to make

3. SAVOR will inspire the users to actually cook and enjoy the meal

Camera

You can SNAP a picture of your fridge and pantry to place all the ingredients in your virtual fridge. It’s an easy step as long as your ingredients are visible.

Virtual Refrigerator

Your virtual refrigerator will have all your ingredients and with a SHAKE or tap on the button (“Find a Recipe”) the recipes will appear. There’s a filter option for users to choose between recipes that take less than 30 minutes or 1 hour. We wanted recipes that’ll save you time by choosing recipes that were delicious and quick to make.

Profile

Use the shopping list to stay organized while going to the grocery store. Add any ingredients that you need from the recipe directly into your shopping list. Also, customize your recipe choice by clicking on any dietary preferences and restrictions. If your tummy is happy, we’re happy too! :)

Takeaways

This challenge motivated us to be more aware of the day to day problems that we face but tend to ignore. Our next steps for INUF are:

1. Doing more user research to understand what we can do better for the user

2. Researching on how well the OCR technology can recognize ingredients from one picture and knowing the limitations

3. Giving incentives for every recipe made to encourage users to cook more