Entui - Your Intuitive Cooking Mate
Product Design, Personal Project, 2022
context
It can be agreed upon that cooking at home is beneficial in many ways -- on your wallet, for your health, for the environment, and more. But in today’s fast- paced world, many working professionals are finding it harder to squeeze out the time and effort to cook, especially when on-demand food delivery is just a few taps away.
As an avid home chef and intuitive eater, I wanted to create a tool that would lighten the load of home cooking, make it easier and more accessible, and help users rebuild the habit of cooking into their lifestyles.
step 1: empathize
Skills used: user interviews, survey, primary and secondary research, persona creation
First, I needed to understand what prevents my target audience from cooking. I undertook 8 user interviews to discuss the attitudes and feelings toward cooking of professionals of various ages and lifestyles. I also wrote and launched a survey on Google Forms to supplement my interviews with more responses.
From there, I built two personas, Andie and Greta, to focus on while I work to build a tool to help solve their cooking obstacles.
step 2: define
Skills used: journey mapping, competitive research and analysis
To define the problem I wished to tackle, I needed to understand what tools were already out there, and why they weren’t doing the job. I wanted to design a mobile app, so I did a competitive audit on meal planning apps found on the Apple AppStore.
I found that apps currently on the market had a few things in common:
- Many are diet tracking apps that focused on calorie counting and only included “healthy” recipes
- Others required lots of user inputs (e.g., user would need to manually choose recipes)
- There was a lack of a comprehensive, one-stop recipe library where one can access reputable recipes (e.g., from publications or chefs)
I realized there is a gap for a simple, low-input and flexible app that automatically plans a week’s meals based on user preferences. It should focus less on counting calories but more on facilitating the cooking process. It should also provide a social aspect where users can follow celebrity chefs, cooking influencers, and publications for their recipes.
step 3: ideate
Skills used: crazy eights, low-fi wireframing
During this phase, I worked on ideas to tackle the biggest user obstacles to cooking, such as “lack of time”, “lack of motivation”, and “poor taste”.
To tackle the lack of time, I designed a tool that automated the meals, grocery lists, and preparation tasks so the user can put planning, prepping and cooking on autopilot. To tackle the lack of motivation, I focused on encouraging notifications and checkbox lists to provide a sense of achievement. And to tackle the poor taste, I suggest creating a large library of quality, professional recipes from magazines, chefs, cooking influencers. The app would collaborate with the chefs similar to how Spotify collaborates with artists.
step 4-5: prototype & test
Skills used: low-fi prototyping, information architecture
Once I collected my ideas, I outlined an information architecture for my app and built out low-fi prototypes in Figma (below left), which I tested with potential users (below right).
