Freshly Chopped App

UX Design / User Interviews / Competitive Analysis / Wireframing / Usability Testing
My role: Conducting 3 user interviews, a competitive analysis, wireframing the recipe pages, and leading 5 usability tests
Team: Kimberly Ha, Sabrina Kayani, Nader Meleika,
Date: October 2023
Overview: As part of an educational project with the University of Concordia, in team of 3 students we were tasked with introducing a new feature to a recipe sharing app named Freshly Chopped. Our objective was to add a feature for ordering recipe ingredients directly on the app. Through a process of user research, and various rounds of wireframing and testing, our team introduced an elegant solution to this challenge.

Persona

The client provided 2 personas which were used as a launching pad to find the ideal target users. Ultimately through conducting interviews, one persona, a health-conscious mother and founder of a business in her mid 30s was identified as the key persona. She could afford to spend a bit more to ensure she could provide herself and her family with nutritious food. She also had a desire to occasionally share cooking duties with her partner.

User Research & Empathizing

We conducted 5 semi-structured interviews with users, targeting users who had experience ordering meal kits or groceries online. Our goal was to gain insight into their experiences, identify pain points, points of satisfaction as well as their motivation for using those services. To organize our findings we recorded our interviews, took extensive notes,  and highlighted key points. We went on to organize our findings through empathy and journey maps. We each created ones for the interviews we conducted individually, and then consolidated our findings into master versions:

Insights gained:
  • Using meal kit services helps more with easing the headache of meal planning than it does saving time.
  • Having images of ingredients is very helpful for the meal assembly process.
  • Having the ability to choose alternate ingredients when ordering a meal kit or recipe ingredients is highly valued.
  • Factors influencing meal selection on meal kit services, include the health value of a meal, the difficulty of the recipe and cooking tools needed.
  • Stronger recommendation systems would help in the meal selection process on meal kit services.
  • Meal or recipe pages on meal kit services could be more intuitive,  to find needed information with less clicks.

How Might We (HMW) Question

Our journey mapping process helped us to generate the following How Might We (HMW) question:

HMW help busy and health-conscious users create meal plans and order the relevant ingredients, in a time efficient way that reduces meal planning stress and facilitates maintaining a healthy diet?

Competitive Analysis

We conducted a competitive analysis taking an in depth look at 4 competitors, 2 in the meal kit space (Blue Apron and Good Food), and 2 that support online grocery order(Instacart, & Door Dash). We identified strengths, weakness and opportunities for each as well as noting observations on their design, UX and content.

Notable Strengths
  • GoodFood: Effective use of banners for announcements and clear categories of meals for user selection.
  • Blue Apron: Good visual for ingredients.
  • Instacart: Effective ‘recipe’ system to order ingredients based on recipes, with the ability to choose ingredient alternatives or modify the quantity of individual ingredients.
  • DoorDash: Clear call to action through central ‘add to cart’ button.
Notable Weaknesses:
  • Blue Apron: Lack of ingredient visuals.
  • DoorDash: No grocery planning support, through integration of recipes or list functionalities. Also the small buttons for adding individual products to cart can be confusing initially..
  • Instacart: Organization of ingredients and recipes was different between storefronts on the platform, creating a lack of consistency.
Opportunities:
  • Instacart: Support for purchasing ingredients according to recipes,  presents a compelling solution for Freshly Chopped who are a recipe app first but looking to add ingredient order.
  • GoodFood: Banners on the homepage provide an effective method of presenting special announcements. This would be helpful in the case of Freshly Chopped to introduce the new ingredient order function.

Storyboard

A simple Storyboard based on our selected persona was generated to continue to empathize with the user and present an ideal scenario for our client, and demonstrate at a high level how the revamped Freshly Chopped app would enhance the life of our target users. Digital illustration by: Sabrina Kayani.

User Flow

We developed a user flow to get a clear idea of all the paths a user could take when interacting with our design, as well as getting an idea of all the screens we would need to build for our wireframes.

Ideation & Wireframing

As a team we generated ideas individually through low fidelity sketches and wireframes. After reconvening we collectively chose which ideas to build off of. Our main idea was to integrate ingredient order directly into the recipe pages, with clear visual representation for ingredients, and the ability to customize order as needed. Wireframes were developped in low fidelity as a basis for design, and increased to medium fidelity, incorporating the existing branding of Freshly Chopped.

Business targets

The clients motivation for redesigning the app redesign was to increase user retention, and user spending while using the Freshly Chopped application. To address the client's business goals, we aimed to make the newly added order and delivery feature highly apparent to the user through a banner on the home page. Moreover once the client opens a recipe page the ability to purchase ingredients is made immediately clear through the ingredient purchase section  being opened by default. Several new icons were added as well such as the cart icon in the right corner of each screen and the delivery truck in the navigation bar. These cue the user to the possibility of ordering through the app. Furthermore, an add to cart button was added when users have ingredients selected to create a clear call to action for the user.

Usability Testing

User testing was conducted with the medium fidelity wireframes with 14 different users. This process was conducted remotely and involved showing users the screens and asking them to narrate how they would interact with the app to achieve certain tasks. Design changes were made in response to direct or observed feedback from testing.

Post-Testing Design Changes

  1. The checkout cart page was initially deemed a bit too crammed and hard to follow, and there was a ‘read more’ button which users didn't quite understand. We proceeded to remove that button and spaced out the ingredients to address those problems.
  2. On the recipe page (see right) several things were changed. For instance the icon for difficulty was changed to be more understandable, the button for the ingredient view modes was changed to a tab selection, and we removed the plus button from the recipe page as it caused consistent confusion for users. We tested all these changes with a new set of users, and they were consistently understood much more clearly .

Medium Fidelity Wireframes

Here are the completed medium fidelity wireframes. These incorporated all feedback from user testing,  addressed the user needs identified in research, as well as addressing the business targets we identified as a team in relation to the client's brief.

Final Reflections

We were able to find an effective solution for adding the ability to order meal ingredients to Freshly Chopped's app, in a simple and effective way. Our solution met the needs and feedback we had gathered through user interviews, while also prioritizing the company's business goals. We received very strong feedback for our work. In retrospect we could have been more precise with some of our business KPIs, and set metrics that could be followed more concretely.

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