FamDin
Families face many daily challenges, and one that we can all relate to on a daily basis can be summed up in one simple question — “What’s for dinner?” With a question so simple, why is it one that is asked daily, often met with a shrug, left unanswered, or even, becomes a point of contention within families?
We set out to explore this problem space by defining our target audience as families who have busy work schedules that make communication and collaborative decision-making a challenge.
Goals —
- Understand what challenges users are facing within the problem scope of family meal planning and decision-making
Methods —
- User Research — Interviewing
- Research Synthesis — Affinity Mapping
- Team Ideation — Design Studio
- Design — Mid & Hi-Fidelity mobile Designs + Prototyping
- Testing — Usability Testing Rounds 1 + 2
Initial Outcomes → Main Designs —
- Users need simple and shareable list and note-taking tools for family
- Families do not have the opportunity to connect when reaching a decision on a meal
- Families need a space for unanimous decisions to be made quickly
User Research
To ensure we had a broad range of interview participants, as well as qualify that our participants are part of our target audience, we performed Screener Surveys. We created a discussion guide to provide a structure to our user interviews. These questions were generated to gain insights into user needs and frustrations within the family meal planning problem space.
Goals —
- Interview discussion guide was created to initiate question and answer
- Uncover major themes or repeated behaviors + user needs / frustrations
Methods —
- There were 6 users interviewed | Average length: 26 minutes
- Screener Survey — Users confirmed that they communicate with their families, and that they are involved in planning and decision-making with their families to be considered for interviewing
Outcomes —
- Users face challenges utilizing and sharing their notes and lists with family
- Users wish they had input from their families about their meals
- Users resort to easy, expensive and unhealthy meals like takeout if they cannot reach decisions
Research Synthesis
With responses from our user interviews, we went through and recorded each interview finding onto sticky notes. We then organized these findings into categories representing major themes. These themes were then used to create “I-Statements”, which expose the user’s pain points and needs.
Goals —
- Gather insights from interviewing from major themes uncovered
- Focus our user needs to our target user base
Methods —
- Record research findings + quotes onto sticky notes — color coded for each interviewee
- Group major findings into an Affinity Map to generate basic categories / themes
Outcomes —
- Users prefer simple and shareable list and note-taking tools because email requires too many steps
- Families do not have the opportunity to connect with their family when reaching a decision on a meal
- Families need a space to allow access for unanimous decisions to be made quickly
Persona
Our persona— Sarah was discovered through the research synthesis process and created “I-Statements”. She represents our primary persona, who give us insight to user frustrations and needs.
Goals —
- Provide structure to the upcoming design phase decision-making motives
Methods —
- Used synthesized “I-Statements” and insights to provide persona drive, thought process, and experience
- Created persona profile to indicate main user goals, needs, and frustrations
Outcomes —
Main Persona Needs + Frustrations:
- Lack of family communication
- Dislikes disagreements on meals within family
- Not having time to plan for and organize meals
Revised Problem Statement
We have learned a lot so far about our users and their main goals, frustrations, and needs within our problem space, so now we need to focus. Why are we doing this again?
Goals —
- To regain focus within our problem space and solidify the problems we need to solve in the following design phase
Methods —
- Reviewed initial problem statement and compared assumptions and change in thinking
Outcomes —
User’s current tools and websites are difficult for families to understand, make it hard for them to communicate and collaborate together
How might we provide families, like Sarah’s, a space for sharing meal ideas, while encouraging family bonding, and ultimately reaching harmony through collective decision-making?
What’s Important → Designing Solutions
After arriving at our revised problem statement, we started ideating potential features we would want to include in our product to help remedy Sarah’s needs and frustrations. With many features ideated, we prioritized the most essential features to remedy key user needs and frustrations in this problem space.
Goals —
- Determine the most important features to include in our initial designs
Methods —
- Created a MoSCoW Map to categorize our list of features into Must, Should, Could, or Won’t be included in this design
- Graphed these features into a Prioritization Matrix to determine the most essential features within our scope
Outcomes —
→ Three most important features to be included:
Design Studio
To generate quick and loose sketches of what we want our initial Home page designs to include and look like,we ran a design studio. We used our generated problem statement and user goals, as well as our feature prioritization to aid us through what designs were needed.
Goals —
- Come to a conclusion on what our Home page will look like
Methods —
- Sketch / Critique in timeboxed increments to create loose hand sketches
- Combine team designs in final round for a collaborative effort
Outcomes —
We created the first hand-sketches of our Home screen in a two-round design studio where we decided..
- Family board is initialized as the home screen
- Boards can be viewed in order of recently created, recently modified — weekly meals, saved recipes..etc.
- Quick action button for creating a new board, a vote, list
Mid-Fidelity Designs
With the hand-sketched Home screen from the Design Studio, our team worked together to design a low-detail Figma prototype to showcase the main features our persona, Sarah, would likely want to do while using our website.
Goals —
- Allow user to stay organized and plan weekly meals
- Have family vote on which meals they want to eat for the week
- User saves recipes to their “recipes” board and can select those recipes to vote on
- Keep user up-to-date with changes on their shared pages with reminders and notifications
Methods —
- Mid-Fi prototype was created in Figma
Outcomes —
- Notifications tab on navigation bar
- Weekly meal planning with each day’s scheduled recipe and grocery list
- Send many recipes to family members to vote what they want for dinner, and FamDin will organize which days you will make them
Usability Testing — Round 1
Once we had our mid-fidelity prototype ready with all the features and functionalities that we assumed would help remedy Sarah’s needs, we were ready to test it with users. Our team discussed and prepared a script that included scenarios and tasks based on our persona.
Methodology —
- Created 3 tasks and scenarios based on our persona
- Recorded: Success Rate, Time on Task, Easiness Rating
As seen above in the Mid-Fi Prototype Testing scorecard, our users did have some trouble using our round 1 designs. Let’s dive deeper into all the task details that all focused on a different page of the design.
High-Fidelity Designs
Now that we have reviewed the main changes or design recommendations from round 1 usability testing, we can start our redesign process for round 2.
Main Changes —
* Home
- Provides users more context with previews of the contents in each board
- Navigation bar pops with bright teal color
* Recipe Voting / Sharing
- Moved “select” multiple photos button to top and make it scrollable
- Made icons more familiar and much larger
📲 Navigate through the mobile prototype here →
🖥 Navigate through the Desktop prototype here →
Usability Testing — Round 2
- Our goal was to record observations of our users as they navigated through our redesigned layout
- We wanted to assess if this layout was easy to navigate and if we had addressed the previous problems our users had when interacting with our product — compare to round 1 testing
- Look for insights that stem to opportunities to improve our design
Recommendations
- Continue to iterate Hi-Fi designs based on feedback from Round 2 testing
- Add in more user testing while iterating
- Enhance usability by improved navigation systems and more user research
