Scrambled

January 2017 - June 2017

Scrambled is an educational cooking app concept designed to motivate people to cook more through education and social interaction. The hope is that one day, there won’t be a need for a product like this and that users will be able to have the skills to cook whatever they want without having to follow a recipe. Part of cooking is the ability to have fun and be flexible with the ingredients you have on hand, rather than a stressful experience that makes people less willing to cook.

This project was completed for the HCDE 2017 BS Capstone by a team of students passionate about cooking. Through our background research, we learned that many Millennials were cooking less at home and this is becoming a health concern. Although there are a number of benefits from cooking at home, such as saving money and better nutrition, Millennials are opting to do otherwise. We investigated and researched the underlying problem of why Millennials are cooking at home less compared to previous generations, and came across two interesting points: lack of confidence and knowledge.

Learn as you go

Explore lessons generated to cater towards your preferences and cooking skill levels. Our in-depth lessons will guide you throughout the cooking process from preparation to plating.

Research

The initial user research provided understanding of our target users, and the problems aligned with current cooking solutions. Our findings revealed the need for a more personal cooking experience that focused on personal growth and learning experience, rather than ‘how to cook’ and following step by step instructions.

Our survey was posted to a Reddit forum for beginner cooks and received 212 responses.

Respondents also preferred to spend less than $100 per week on groceries, and only cooked 2-3 times per week. Some major frustrations were: the time and effort required to cook, doing dishes, and their lack of cooking ability. Based on these results, we wanted to make cooking fun, fast, and educational, and considered possible features to implement:

• Suggested recipes based on favorite cuisine, budget, and cooking level

• User-inputted grocery list that tracks what you have, don’t have, and need

• Recipe measurements based on unit preference and serving size

• Recipe description level based on preference (e.g. simple vs. scientific)

To develop a deeper understanding of why people are not cooking as much, we conducted three 30-minute interviews with participants who fit our following demographic requirements: no professional culinary experience, between the ages of 18 and 35, are considered within the middle class economic standards, and are currently residing in the U.S. All of our participants noted that they often encountered the issue of not having all the ingredients on a recipe. The availability of ingredients in a person’s inventory is an important factor to consider when making a recipe. They also noted that pictures or videos were helpful for them to make or find recipes.

We also attended a 2 hr cooking class on sushi for observational research with Hipcooks, an urban kitchen and cooking school in Seattle. There were no recipes, and students were encouraged to just try and be creative. Over the short period of time, students gained confidence and much of the overall, positive experience was due to interacting with other people and being able to help each other out. This inspired our main interest in social cooking and how we can tackle that problem through design.

Following our user research findings, we created our personas (3) and designed requirement matrices to determine the main problems and features we needed to consider. Two personas fit the 18-24 range because that was the largest percent of respondents in our survey. Grocery budgets, frequency of cooking, and cooking struggles were also selected based on the most popular responses in that age range with those characteristics.

We narrowed the scope of our project by listing the main cooking problems identified in our research and ranked the severity of those problems for each persona based on their goals and scenarios. The lowest ranked determined the most important problem.

Based on the matrix, cooking knowledge was the most important problem and reevaluated our list of potential features. We rated whether each persona would not care (X), care (checkmark), or feel neutral (0), about each feature and mapped them to their respective score (-1, 0, 1). Higher totals indicated main features that should be implemented first.

Design

Moving towards the final prototype, we finalized the designs in Adobe Xd and Framer. I also designed the app logo and during the process, considered how the app goals and purpose could be conveyed through it.

Presentation

Below is the poster I designed for our Capstone Open House presentation. Our project was well received, and one of the comments we heard frequently was if we planned on developing this idea further, and that they would download it if given the opportunity. This was rewarding to hear because it meant there was a definite need in the community for a product like this, and that potential users understood the purpose and goal of this app.