Baking is often associated with comfort food. Conjuring up homemade scones, chocolate brownies, macaroons or cupcakes provides people with a sense of home and comfort. However, baking can be a time consuming task and not everyone has enough time to spend on baking. The purpose of this project is to make baking less time consuming and more accessible to everyone.
iOS
Product Designer
10 Weeks
A typical baking experience looks something like this: find a recipe, check to see if any of the grocery stores near you sell the ingredients, go and buy the ingredients, measure all ingredients, mix them together, bake, and voila! If you did everything right, then it shouldn’t taste awful this time …
I conducted interviews with people who had experience with baking to get a better sense of their pain points and to gain insights from their experiences with the problem space. Three of the interviews were with young working professional and one with a mother of three.
Baking is mainly a
People avoid baking because it can be
People face
Measuing ingredients and
People like to source recipes from family and friends
One important insight to keep in mind is that consumers are mainly spontaneous with their baking habits; however, this does not mean that consumers do not plan ahead for their future baking needs. For example, if a consumer knows they will be hosting a gathering at a later date, they might be more inclined to plan ahead.
The design had to take into consideration both these baking habits. Not only is it important to allow users to be spontaneous with their baking, but it’s also important to support them if they need to plan ahead.
Based on feedback from interviews, I formed a general idea of the various user groups within the focus area of the project, including the ways users differ from one another. Consequently, I identified a user persona for the project. The persona helped me focus on the users’ needs and guided my decisions as I moved forward in the process.
From all data gathered, user stories were established to reflect the tasks Sara would hope to accomplish in order to bake a dish. Similar tasks were then clustered together into epics; which will later translate into the basis of the product’s key features to be designed.
Explore and search recipes
Purchase the ingredients you are missing
Detemine the complexity of your baking experience
Once I'm ready to bake
My main focus was to build out the core interaction “Find A Recipe and Purchase Ingredients”. I began by sketching on paper and worked into a low-fidelity wireframe. Consequently, I built a quick prototype to gain general feedback from users and to get a better sense of the product.
As I moved forward in the process, I began to develop a more comprehensive understanding of my user group and of the problem space. As a result, I was able to identify a number of significant changes to be addressed. In order for me to move forward with a moderated usability test of a more developed prototype, I first had to address all usability concerns.
At this stage in the process, I was able to develop my designs and prototype further. The following prototype was used to measure the core interaction task.
Crave was designed in a total of 10 weeks. The app was only developed as a design prototype. I still think this is a very promising space to explore. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in developing this project further.
