Mosaic
Cooking at home has never been the same
Project Background
Progressing as a UX Designer, I decided to complete a design sprint to test my limits as a designer and practice the prototyping of apps on figma. Giving myself one week, I wanted to assess how well I could design a product with a given time limit and present to fellow design disciplinary colleagues as a brainstorming activity for critique.
ROLE
Product Designer
PERIOD
One Week
METHOD
Product Designer
PRACTICES
User Research, UX & UI Design, Prototyping
Problem Statement
A parent’s job is to help their kids build healthy eating habits and maintain a healthy diet in their family. Eating healthy has been perceived expensive and cooking healthy meals has been rendered time consuming. But perhaps the biggest barrier to healthy eating is that the diet industry has made us feel that in order to live a healthy life, we can’t enjoy food and we need to diet and deprive ourselves.
After analysing the problem statement, I began extracting the following questions I would try to answer through my design. These questions became my design goals that I wanted to achieve through the design.
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How do families build healthy eating habits?
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How can parents save time?
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How can parents save money?
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How can the product help families enjoy eating helathy?
To progress to the next stage, I conducted a series of brainstorming possible solutions to answer the following questions. Upon the brainstorming I wanted to create an inclusive app that could appeal to a wide range of users.​
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Mosaic is a platform that serves the purpose of convenient healthy eating by connecting cultures through the art of cooking through online grocery shopping. The app allows the user to browse recipes and add ingrediets directly to their shopping cart while searching up “Grandmas Best Korean Beef Stew Recipe”.
Mosaic is designed to be a community based platform for users to exchange culture and browse healthy recipes shared by people from around the world and ordering the ingredients to your doorstep.
Why a multicultural recipe app?
Cooking is a passionate job that allows people to turn an ordinary meal into a memorable experience whilst keeping track of your ingredients to maintain a healthy and balanced meal.
Especially during the initial Covid-19 phase when many people found themselves needing to stay at home, the one hobby that many people found themselves working on was their culinary skills. Although some were more successful than others, One of the struggles was being able to cook different cuisines that were sometimes limited by culinary skill and resources, while opposed to ordering out was expensive and unhealthy over long periods.
Design Process
Due to the time limitations, I wanted to break down the design process to create a linear path and be able to dedicate approriate time to each componten, Discorver, Describe, Ideate and Design. These steps were the foundation for my design sprint to guide me from the problem statement to the final prototype.
Executive Intent
To create a diverse community of culture exchange through food. The platform aims give individuals a space to share and learn about foods that they know of or want to learn more about, as well as be an affordable and healthier alternative to eating out and ordering delivery.
​Target Audience
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Individuals who wish to learn how to cook new cuisines
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Users who want convience with grocery shopping
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Individuals who would like to find alternatives for healthier eating
​General Task of App
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Sign-in or Sign-up
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Create profile and select cuisines of preference and interest
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Browse through recipes
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Add ingredients into shopping cart
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Adjust and confirm order
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Make Payment
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Recieve order confirmation
Design Stratergy
Meet the Personas
To explore the effectiveness of the design, Creating personas that would benefit the most from the app was crucial to help strategize and make effective design decisions to build empathy towards the product. I wanted appeal to users from different backgrounds as well as family settings, as the target audience was families who were looking to build healthy lifestyle eating habits and find cost effective alternatives.
Goals
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Have the convenience of groceries deliverd to the home
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Wide range of selections, so her meals can be more personalised for her and her family
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Maintain her active healthy lifestyle
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Frustrations
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Limited range of healthy options when eating out
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“It’s difficult to find fast and healthy options around without having to spend so much.”
Goals
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To be able to order ingredients from local ethnic supermarkets
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Wants to able to buy groceries that are not overpriced
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Convenience of ordering groceries online
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Frustrations
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Wants to learn to cook other cuisines but has limited resources
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Grocery delivery services are limited in products
User Journey
Once the personas were explored, the next step was putting myself in their shoes and understanding how they would navigate through the app. This user journey is the breakdown of the overall process a user would go through in order to complete their goal within the app. Based off the design goals, using a user journey allowed me to define one of the paths a user may undergo while using the product.
Information Architecture
Defining the overall user journey allowed me to break down the app as well as organise the overall layout of the product. Categorising the main functions of the app helped me to decide where specific functions needed to go and make justified decisions.
Wireframing
I started off with low fidelity wireframes on paper to experiment what was the most effective and efficient way to bring the design to life. These designs were then converted to digital wireframes and then later into a prototype.
Low-Fidelity
Mid-Fidelity
High-Fidelity
Prototype
By the end of the project, I had completed a prototype to get a complete feel of the product and how it would look for a user to navigate.
Reflections
It was the first time for me working on a project with such a short time limitation, I was forced to make decisive decisions based on the resources I had. Ideally I would like to conduct further user research and testing on the product to have more statistical evidence to better refine the design decisions that have been made, but the flexibility of being able to design without restrictions allowed me to be more ambitious with the product and how it functions. Although it was a lot of work for a solo project, it was ultimately rewarding and insightful to be flexible and explore the design options and user interactions through the process.
