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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

  • ​To find out the availability of access to homecooked Asian meals

  • Find out pain points and needs when preparing Asian meals

  • Refine problem space

  • Identify more opportunities 

  • Learn about the eating/cooking/grocery shopping habits and preferences of people who enjoy Asian food and the problems they incur

  • Proto-personas

  • SWOT analysis

  • Primary Research

  • Interviews

  • 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

  • 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). 

  • 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: 

  • All participants live in the city

  • All participants are tech-savvy

  • All participants are Asian

  • More than half are close in age

  • 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:

  • Recipe Suggestion

  • Ingredient Management

  • Smart Grocery List

  • 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.)

prototypes.png

More Coming Soon!

Ma's Meals
 

Overview
Discovery
Define

Check out my other UX/UI Projects

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