Umami
Recipe App
Umami is an app that makes it easy to find recipes based on ingredients home cooks already have on hand - saving them time and money, enabling them to cook more nutritious meals, and reducing stress and waste.
Umami is an app that makes it easy to find recipes based on ingredients home cooks already have on hand - saving them time and money, enabling them to cook more nutritious meals, and reducing stress and waste.
This project was completed in the span of three weeks under a team of 5. The goal was to create a mid fidelity prototype. We conducted user research, research analysis, created wireframes, received feedback and iterated designs.
We began to brainstorm what our user would look like for Umami. We decided it's someone with little free time to go to store often but wants to cook better meals.
5 users were interviewed about their meal planning, shopping habits and food wasting. The results were compiled into an affinity diagram.
We then organized the affinity diagram into an empathy map to describe how our typical user sees, hears, says & does thinks and feels.
Carlos, an exhausted nursing student with a busy schedule, needs help planning cheap and quick recipes because he is wasting valuable time and money on groceries that keep going bad.
The user scenario describes the struggle Carlos goes through when he spends on groceries and then doesn't know what to make.
The storyboard illustrates Carlos' journey to discover Umami. He initially is overwhelmed by how much he is spending on groceries and how much food he wastes. His friends recommend Umami and gets exposed to so many recipes he can make with groceries he already has.
In order to identify which features to add to the Umami, we noted ideas into categories of "I Like", "I Wish" and "What If". We put items we wanted in the app into I Wish and ideas where the sky is the limit went into "What If".
We then sorted those ideas by priority and feasibility and dot voted on the ideas
I designed our user flow to be straight forward for our user's busy lifestyle. When the user opens the app, they will decide how to sign up either with Google, Apple or email. They will then be asked if they would like to add what ingredients they have on hand either by taking photos of items or entering them manually by name. On the dashboard, the user can browse recipes by what they have on hand.
Each member of the group sketched screens of the user flow. We voted on which screens we liked the best. I contributed the sign up form and photo capture prompt screen.
Converting from sketches to low fidelity prototype, we clarified how to add more ingredients on the "My Pantry screen" by taking a photo or add by name manually.
Our user testing plan, included 4 tasks to be completed by three users. We had users create an account, add an ingredient to "My Pantry", select a recipe, and substitute an ingredient. Most users were able to complete these tasks and we recorded feed back in a prioritization matrix.
In our final prototype for the project, I made the design more mid fidelity by adding images, adding the ability to substitute ingredients and cleaning up animations.
Our next steps to improve the project include adding expiration dates to ingredients that are editable like the example shown off to the right, this way users are able to go back into their pantry and change what may be soon to expire, allowing the user to know when or what to cook next.
