How to help people easily follow cooking instructions with google ventures design sprint.
Savr is a new startup that shows hundreds of recipes, and cooking tips for at-home chefs.
My role in this project was to run a design sprint to quickly test possible solutions. I was provided with user interviews, design constraints, research highlights, and personas that helped me understand the Savr customer base and their goals.
Problem
Savr has an active community of users who rate and review recipes for other users. Recently, Savr has seen some negative reviews about recipes that involve many steps, or more advanced techniques. Many people who were excited about a certain recipe end up disappointed with the outcome, because they didn't feel the instructions were clear, or easy to execute. Savr gets lots of positive feedback on the quality of their recipes, but now they need to help users accurately, and easily follow the cooking instructions.
Day 1 - Mapping the experience
It is important to break the process down into smaller steps for people to follow along, and learn the process of cooking whichever recipe. To simplify, I recommend breaking the cooking process down into the kitchen prep, ingredient prep, and then the actual cooking. The prep work is as important as the cooking itself. If not more important. The first step, is to get the kitchen ready. This includes kitchenware such as knives, cutting boards, blenders, etc. This is then followed by preparing the ingredients, such as dicing vegetables, cutting and marinating meat, or making a sauce or seasoning. Once the kitchen & ingredients are ready, you are ready to start cooking.
Day 2 - Sketching
For the first half of this sketching phase, I did some lightning demos with similar services and looked for how they might have solved the issue Savr was having. I found that a lot of other services were using images to help those who preferred to visualize the cooking process. Other services did a better job in providing instructions for techniques, tips, and tutorials. Looking at other examples helped get the creative juices flowing as I got started to sketch out the most important screens from the map I created on day 1 using the crazy 8’s method. I then chose the most important screen from the exercise and sketched out a possible solution.
Day 3 - Decide (Storyboard)
After having a few sketches of potential screens and a direction to pursue, I created a storyboard to help plan for the prototype and identify all the essential UI elements. I kept the initial map from day 1 in mind when developing the rest of the storyboard screens. The recipe page should contain all of the necessary info that a user would find helpful knowing before the cooking starts. For example, kitchenware, timing, and ingredients. After the user has prepped the kitchen and all the necessary ingredients, they are ready to start cooking.
Day 4 - Prototype
For day 4, I created high fidelity screens from the storyboard and made a prototype.
Day 5 - Test
For Day 5, I interviewed 5 people with different levels of experience with cooking. I asked the participants to interact with the prototype in the scenario of looking for a last minute protein pancake recipe in their kitchen. It was very specific, but ease of finding the recipe wasn’t what I was testing, so in this case I felt it was okay to give specific initial instructions. I wanted to test if the organization of information was correct when it came to cooking instructions, and if it was easy enough to follow with limited time. In both the first two iterations, I received similar feedback where the instructions were clear, however they were not aware right away that each step was clickable and had a full screen view for those who like to follow step by step. After the first two tests, I made some changes to some screens hoping to improve this part of the flow.
The next few interviews went pretty well and participants did not encounter the same issues as the first participants. One thing that resulted from the second round of testing was that the kitchenware tools needed were missing.
Findings & Reflections
Sprints can be a powerful method and tool used to get a team aligned and iterate quickly on potential solutions. From conducting a sprint for this project, I found that people have different preferences for how they like information presented to them, especially step by step instructions. At the end I was able to find a balance for those who like to quickly scroll down a page to follow instructions, and those who like to view steps one at a time.