Overview
Background
Smart Pantry was designed to help average consumers keep track of inventory and improve kitchen pantry management. Users can input or scan the ingredients they have on hand to their virtual pantry and discover for a variety of recipes.
Challenge
Reduce food waste and ignite culinary creativity that grants users the ability to monitor their grocery inventory and empowers them to harness unused ingredients, guiding them to craft delectable recipes.
Solution
To develop an app that revolutionizes kitchen organization with real-time inventory tracking and recommending recipes based on ingredients that are already present at home.
Role
Product Designer
Team Size
3
Tools
Figma
Miro
Trello
Our user research plan was carefully designed to obtain valuable insights. It included a strategic approach to asking participants about their experiences, preferences, and pain points.
What are users' grocery shopping and cooking habits?
Find out if people like to cook home food more or if they like to eat out.
Where and how do people go grocery shopping? What kind of groceries do they like to get?
How do people decide what they're going to eat at home?
Our group brainstormed questions and conducted a survey that asked about meals and groceries. A total of 12 participants were gathered.
From the responses, majority of participants cook meals at home rather than order take out and no participants had meals outside of home. All participants experienced food waste. Food waste was experienced mostly sometimes while often was the second most common occurrence and always and rarely were similarly the least common occurrence.
Through the interviews, we aimed to gain a deeper understanding of user needs and perceptions, ultimately guiding our design decisions and improvements.
Some research questions included:
How long does one trip of groceries last you?
How often do you order takeout?
How often do you cook?
From the interview I conducted, the user preferred cooking at home rather than ordering takeout and cooked about three to four days a week. They had certain meals that they cooked most often because of familiarity so it was the easiest for them to cook as well. They used apps and websites for recipes to improve their own recipes and make their meals tastier.
We gathered the notes from each interview and grouped them into four categories.
After making the affinity diagram, we outlined an empathy map. It allowed us to get to know our users better by sorting their needs, feelings, thoughts, and actions from the diagram. Through this process, we were able to design something that really fits what users want.
We referred back to our research, user survey and interview findings, and empathy map to create our hypothetical user, Alex. Alex helps us understand what users might need, goals, pain points, activities. We laid out a user journey map to better identify pain points in his journey and where he experiences opportunities for improvement by coming into contact with Smart Pantry.
According to user surveys, users need to utilize existing ingredients in their pantry more effectively because 75% of people cook at home rather than ordering takeout yet 100% of food was wasted either always, often, sometimes, or rarely due to expired ingredients.
During user interviews, we discovered that the user loves cooking but often finds it challenging to come up with creative meals using the ingredients available at home.
Therefore, we believe that users want recipe ideas based on the ingredients and groceries that are already available at home and that we might be able to help if we created an app that gave solutions to users on how to use the food and ingredients that they have.
We might do this by having an inventory list that users could input their ingredients and food and have an AI search engine that gives a list of possible recipes on how to cook them. The recipes would include step-by-step instructions. Doing this will allow our product to offer users a solution to wasting less food that saves both time and money so that they can feel more inspired to cook food at home.
We believe by creating an app for those who cook at home and have leftover groceries in their pantry that they weren’t able to cook with attain greater culinary creativity, reduce food waste, and improve financial efficiency. Our product, Smart Pantry was designed to.
Smart Pantry was designed to wasting less food for people who cook at home by recommending recipes based on what people have in their pantry and being able to utilize the ingredients that they already have at home, achieving seamless meal planning, increased kitchen resourcefulness, and savings on grocery expenses.
We brainstormed as a group features and combined our ideation for Smart Pantry.
We grouped our ideation into three categories and performed a group dot voting.
From our group dote voting, we narrowed our ideation down to three key features.
As part of our design process, I provided an example that shows a flow of actions, leading the user to the product as well as them interacting with the product.
By presenting David's problem of accumulating leftover groceries that he hasn’t been able to cook with, goal of wanting to make use of what he has in his pantry, and solution of finding recipes that include ingredients he has, this allowed us to have a better understanding of mapping out the user flow.
Our user flow walks us through from the user beginning on Smart Pantry's homepage to searching for ingredients with the recipes they have added to their virtual pantry.
Before jumping into the process of creating the solution, we researched other recipe suggestion apps. Through our market research, we identified top direct and indirect competitors. By evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, this helped us identify some drawbacks in the existing solutions and opportunities for a better user experience.
After planning how users will move through the app, we started drawing wireframes. We made many versions on paper to make sure the digital versions addressed user problems. For the home screen, we focused on making it so that users can quickly and easily add the ingredients they have at home. Smart Pantry allows users to upload their ingredients by typing on the keyboard, saying with voice function, or scanning with camera.
We brought our sketches into wireframes to prepare and conduct usability tests.
We prepared a user testing plan to observe how users interacted with the app and identify where improvements could be made. Participants were given a scenario and the following tasks to complete:
Input an ingredient in the search box and add it to Pantry
Go to list of recipes and select a recipe
Save a recipe and find it in the Favorites section of the menu
From usability tests, users did not find instructions unclear when given and did not find features difficult to use when asked.
In addition to feedback from users, we closely analyzed areas where we could iterate on during usability testing.
Iterations from user testing were transferred into wireframes. Our wireframes were prototyped with a final design.
View the mobile prototype below or click here to view it in Figma.
