Sage
Sage is cooking assistant app that helps make home cooking simpler and more engaging. With the growing preference of technology over cookbooks in the kitchen, it's important that apps retain the tasteful simplicity of written recipes while offering a more convenient and educational experience for home cooks that only enhance the joy of cooking.
Home cooks need a more intuitive way to prepare and read recipes that promotes learning because cooking every evening can be daunting when there's too much guesswork involved.
UX Research & UX Design
Design Tools
User Research
Research Strategy
Since I wasn’t very familiar with the what was in the market for cooking apps and, having never used a cooking assistant before, I began with some secondary research to gain a better understanding of the market trends and demographics. I then conducted interviews to learn more about the different experiences people have had while cooking at home.
Through my research, I wanted to:
- Understand the market trends of the home cooking industry
- Identify Sage's competitors and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses
- Learn about the current trends in with cooking apps and how they're being used in businesses
- Understand the experiences people have when cooking at home
- Discover the goals, needs, motivations, and frustrations of Sage's users
- Identify Sage's target market
Market Research
To learn more about the market trends and demographics for cooking apps , I started with market research with the help of Google. Through market research, I was able to gain a more thorough understanding and fill in the gaps of my knowledge about the industry to better inform my design decisions moving forward. Here are some of the key insights that I discovered:
- 59% of 25- to 35-year -olds cook with either their smartphones or tablets handy, while people 35 and older are more likely to print out a recipe.
- Despite 48% using traditional cook books, 4/10 adults will turn to online videos to make sure they are doing things correctly
- 68% of millenial women said that they watch videos while cooking and 23% use voice search in the kitchen
- 71% of people have "gone digital" in the kitchen with 23% getting their cooking ideas form Facebook and 21% from Instagram
- While just 49% of people consider themselves a "good cook", a third admit they are now more confident in the kitchen thanks to the use of technology
According to this graph, nearly half of those surveyed said that they cooked more often at home during the pandemic than before. Many also simplified their home cooking, tried new recipes, and cooked with other people.
I'm sure many of us could attest to the shift in our dining rituals from eating out to cooking most meals at home once we found ourselves in lock down during the pandemic. Though this does not guarantee a permanent shift as restaurants open back up, it's clear that those who choose to cook more at home are relying more and more on technology to make the cooking process less of a headache. This is great for cooking apps and bodes well for the kind of app that I'm looking to build.
Competitor Analysis
Next, I wanted to take a closer look at Sage’s competitors and how they’re helping to make cooking a more enjoyable experience for everyone. Through my research, I identified some top direct competitors within the industry: Project Foodie, Mealime, and Supercook. Exploring each of their apps, I evaluated their strengths and weaknesses to see how Sage could fill in any gaps moving forward.
Strengths:
- Well produced video instructions for each step in the recipe
- List of ingredients and cookware that you can order from the app
- Quality how-to videos on cooking processes
- Made by a professional chef
Weaknesses:
- Video automatically full-screens when you hit play
- No ability to cooment or rate recipe
- Limited amount of recipes
Strengths:
- Meal plan creation that is simple and intuitive
- Lists cookware, ingredients, and instructions on recipe page
- Cooking mode that focuses on each step of the recipe
- Timer that's automatically set for the time you need
Weaknesses:
- Can only cook recipes in your meal plan
- Requires subscription to make certain meals
- No video or photo instructions in cooking mode
Strengths:
- Finds recipes based on what you have in your pantry
- Uses speech to list out your ingredients
- How-to videos on the basics
- Add ingredients you don't have to shopping list
Weaknesses:
- Recipe directions link to a webpage outside the app
- You can only see recipes that you have the ingredients for
- Redundant with the same recipes over and over
User Interviews
- Participants: 3
- Age Range: 28 - 45
- Interests: eating/cooking
- Average Time: 1 hour
In order to learn about the real experiences people have had while cooking, I recruited 3 participants that ranged from avid home cooks to fast food frequenters for user interviews. Here, I focused on asking open-ended questions about their cooking experiences that focused on how they prefer to cook, where they get their recipes from, and what their biggest pain points are while cooking.
Interview Findings
My main goal for the user interviews was to see if home cooks were interested in an app that improved their cooking process and what specific pain points they experienced while cooking. This is what I found:
- All of those I interviewed saw cooking as a time-consuming chore. The process of gathering ingredients, prepping, going back and forth between the recipe and cooking, and finally serving was daunting at the end of a tiring day.
- Many recipes were jargon heavy and seemed more catered to knowledgeable cooks. Interviewees seemed eager to learn how to cook properly but lacked an easy way to access that information.
- The internet is full of recipe variations which can be overwhelming when one is trying to choose the best recipe for them. The paradox of choice seems to be a common issue with home cooks.
After my interviews, I decided to focus on the main pain points listed above. I wanted to next explore what sort of features would best serve amateur cooks and bring the joy back into cooking. But first, lets define the problem...
Research Results
Defining the Problem
Many of the insights that I gained from my market research and user interviews seemed to revolve around issues that keep hesitant users from cooking at home more often. There are many problems that avid home cooks have while cooking, but I wanted my app to target those who find cooking a chore and focus on issues that keep users out of the kitchen all together. Lets simplify what I have so far:
- Cooking is time consuming. How might we simplify and shorten the time it takes for users to prep and cook meals?
- Recipes are confusing. How might we eliminate jargon while encouraging people to learn cooking tecniques?
- There are too many variations on recipes. How might we ensure the quality of our recipes and eliminate the paradox of choice?
Project Goals
After getting a handle on the problems I wanted to solve, I then decided to lay out a strategy to help determine what goals I’m trying to meet and to help me determine which solutions I need to prioritize. First, I started by defining the project goals to get a clear understanding of what we’re trying to achieve and where the business and user goals align.
Feature Matrix
Having focused my attention on three main goals: reliable recipes, easy to use, and access to learning material, I then wanted to outline which features should be my highest priority. I decided to put the cooking flow (from choosing a recipe to cooking it) at the top of my priority list when working on my first iteration. Below is a list of features according to their importance and feasibility.
User Flows
Now I wanted to dive even deeper and get a better understanding of the overall journey a Sage user would be taking throughout the app from start to finish. I wanted to better empathize with the scenario a user may be in, different decisions they would be making, and also the different paths they might take to complete the key tasks I identified. To do this, I created a few user flows and stepped into the shoes of a home cook.
Design Decisions
------- In Progress -------
Mid-Fi Prototypes
I'm currently in the wireframing and testing phase for Sage and I wanted to give a sneak-peak into some of the mid-fi screens I'm showing to users.
This is the start of the on-boarding section of the app. When a new user logs in for the first time, they will have the option to set up their pantry by adding typical ingredients and cookware they normally have in their kitchen.
This is the home page that is personalized based on what ingredients the user has available and the types of cuisines they like. There is also an explore page where users can search for recipes.
This is the recipe instruction page where users can cycle through the recipe step-by-step. I'm currently working on adding a speech function so the process of flipping through steps is more hands-off.
Design System
Though I'm still in the process of working out some of the details of the final design, I still wanted to show some of the things I've been thinking about. For a color palette, I wanted to combine the calming green of sage with the bright, exuberant pink of rhubarb to give a fun and fresh feel to the app. For typography I went with Recoleta as a heading font which takes inspiration from a variety of 1970s fonts and has a nice retro cookbook feel to it. The Cera Pro font is perfect for long and short blocks of text and provides easy readability.