Project Overview
When I moved to the US for university, I had a lot of trouble with preparing meals for myself. I often lacked the time and motivation needed to cook constantly. It's also a lot of hassle to go grocery shopping. Sometimes I'm not sure what ingredients to get or I just don't have enough knowledge of them.
Naturally, I ate out a lot. However, I found that many of the homecooked Asian dishes that I craved were not available in restaurants. The only way I could get them is if I put the effort to cooking them (which would do a favor to my dying wallet...).
And so I wondered...is there a way to ease the meal prep process which would help me make the homecooked Asian dishes that I crave?


Discovery
Research Goals
Methods
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To find out the availability of access to homecooked Asian meals
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Find out pain points and needs when preparing Asian meals
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Refine problem space
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Identify more opportunities
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Learn about the eating/cooking/grocery shopping habits and preferences of people who enjoy Asian food and the problems they incur
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Proto-personas
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SWOT analysis
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Primary Research
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Interviews
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User Journey Map
Proto-personas
I quickly created a few proto-personas to measure my research against. I listed my prediction of their goals, behaviors, needs, attributes and my assumptions.




SWOT Analysis
I also did SWOT analysis of 4 existing services on the market that has similarities to my initial idea of an Asian food delivery service.




Primary Research
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I looked at 50 menus (on Google) of different Asian restaurants in NYC (25 Chinese restaurants, 15 Japanese restaurants, 10 Korean restaurants, 5 Vietnamese restaurants).
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I visited 10 different Asian grocery stores in NYC
Looked up 20 most popular Asian home-cooked meals (5 of each countries listed above) and the ingredients for them -
This helped me identify the availability of access to homecooked Asian meals, to further refine the problem space
~92%
of the ingredients needed for the meals found in grocery stores, not all are found in the same grocery store.
~37%
of the home-cooked meals not found in menus


Interviews and Survey
I conducted 4 semi-structured 1-1 interviews, 3 in the interviewee's home space and 1 online. I also did a survey involving 23 anonymous participants.
Participant limitations:
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All participants live in the city
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All participants are tech-savvy
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All participants are Asian
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More than half are close in age
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I compiled the steps in preparing food of my interviewers into a combined user journey map.


Top Insights Overview


Define
Problem to Solution
Before doing research, I had a vision for what the app would be, which was an Asian grocery delivery app. However, insights from the research led me to developing a different concept. I decided to make an app with these main features:
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Recipe Suggestion
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Ingredient Management
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Smart Grocery List
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Shopping Assistant
Wireframes
I created my task flow and then began to design some concept sketches of the potential digital translation of the application. I created several variations; the preferred sketch, upon which I built my wireframes, is shown here. (More images coming soon.)

More Coming Soon!
Ma's Meals
Check out my other UX/UI Projects


