Kitchen Stories | My Portfolio

Kitchen Stories: How can we improve the recipe organisation experience?

Overview

My Role: UX Researcher

Timeline: 5 weeks

Tools: Figma, FigJam, Dovetail, Maze

Methods: In-depth UIs, Surveys, Usability study, Competitive analysis

Problem Space

Background:

Kitchen Stories is a free recipe app that provides users with access to a wide range of recipes. It began with a simple recipe organisation but as new features have been released, users found it difficult to organise their recipes, which drove down user satisfaction and engagement. I worked in a team of three UX Researchers to uncover how we might help new and casual cooks organise their recipes better within the Kitchen Stories app.

Research Goals:

1. Understand how new and casual cooks organise their recipes in order to improve the recipe organisation experience in Kitchen Stories.

2. Identify the needs new and casual cooks have and the pain points they face when trying to organise their recipes.

3. Identify pain points and potential bottlenecks in the current recipe organisation experience.

Generative Research

Surveys:

The surveys comprised a mix of open-ended and closed-ended questions and were completed by 27 respondents. The quantitative data yielded the following results:

Qualitative data from open-ended survey questions was synthesised with interview transcripts for later analysis.

In-depth Interviews:

We interviewed 6 participants, who we knew were casual cooks, in semi-structured interviews that lasted around 60 min each. In order to understand how they organise their recipes and the related pain points and needs we asked open-ended questions such as:

1. You’re planning your dinner and you’re trying to decide what to make. Talk me through your process.

2. When you see a recipe you like, it’s not going to work for today but you may want to try it later on, do you save it? How? Tell me about it.

3. How would you organise them to allow you to search through them effectively?

Interviews have been transcribed and analysed in Dovetail together with qualitative data from surveys. Some of the main themes uncovered in the affinity mapping process involved:

Evaluative Research

Competitive Analysis:

We compared three popular cooking apps to see what worked and what could be improved.

1. Vegan offered personalised experience with meal planning and calorie tracking but minimal filtering options.

2. Tasty allowed users to add their own recipes but offered no filtering options for new or saved recipes.

3. Yummly had good recipe filtering options but the navigation was difficult and screens were cluttered as if not adopted well from web design.

Usability Testing:

We used Maze to test 17 participants who were given three tasks to complete within a high-fidelity prototype.

Key usability testing takeaways:

1. Users did not like scrolling through articles to get to recommended recipes.

2. Users found saving recipes straightforward.

3. Users confused the heart for liked recipes with saved recipes due to the unclear use of symbols and headings.

Feature Prioritisation

Key Insights & Recommendations

Insight 1:

Users face time constraints

Users choose recipes based on convenience, thus they need features to improve the recipe organisation and ultimately save time. All further insights are tied to this main one.

Recommendation 1:

Develop time-saving features

Developing time-saving features such as the ability to add recipes from other sources and grocery list integration would aid the users' recipe orgnisation experience.

Insight 2:

Users need filtering options for saved recipes

Users reported a need for having filtering options for saved recipes such as by ingredient, meal type and prep time. During the usability study they struggled to find the search bar.

Recommendation 2:

Add a top search bar and expand filtering options

Moving the search bar to the top of the screen would make the navigation more intuitive. Adding filtering options to saved recipes and expanding filtering options for new recipes would improve their recipe organisation experience.

Insight 3:

Users struggled to save and retrieve recipes

Usability tests of Kitchen Stories showed that users could not differentiate between the “save” and “like” buttons, as well as struggled to find saved recipes within “my first cookbook”.

Recommendation 3:

Change titles, symbols and re-test

The symbols and titles under “my recipes” should be adjusted so that users can differentiate between features and navigate more intuitively (e.g. “saved”, “added” and “liked”).

Reflections

1. Since this project was a part of a bootcamp, I did not get to do the research I would have done if it was a real life project such as:

interviewing the stakeholders and learning about business goals
having a chance to test the usability of the newly introduced features
having a chance to do A/B tests or 5-second tests on the proposed interface changes.

2. With my background in data analysis, I could have focused the survey solely on quantitative data and tried to recruit more respondents to obtain more meaningful data.

3. If I had more time I would have conducted usability interviews instead of unmoderated short tasks to observe the users' interactions with the prototype in person and get more in-depth information.