7 weeks
People decide when and what to cook every day. Aside from each recipe's desirability, time, and ingredients, dietary restrictions and preferences as well as the cook’s skill level in the kitchen all play critical roles in deciding what food to prepare.
We decided to focus on international students, who are more inclined to cook their meals instead of eating out. By interviewing 10 international students, we found that reducing the stress of deciding what to cook can help alleviate their homesickness.
User Goal: Reduce homesickness by simplifying meal decisions.
While there are thousands of recipes on the app, students struggle to find time to decide what to eat, cook consistently, or go grocery shopping amidst their busy schedules. By narrowing down choices, we help students integrate cooking into their hectic routines.
User Goal: Simplify meal choices to fit students' busy lives.
We decided to embed CookJam in NYT Cooking app, one of the largest cooking app with a diverse range of cultural recipes and ingredients one could find in the U.S. It offers a large database of quality recipes as well as the tools and expertise to help home cooks from students to amateur chiefs prepare great meals.
Send request to your loved ones alongside your preferences, ingredients available, and a personal note.
Receive recipe playlist made just for you and leave comments for more information. Now, you are ready to meal prep and cook.
Got notification from your loved ones miles away, approved the request, and start putting together a recipe playlist with the existing database.
Leave notes or special reminders for people you are making the playlist for to support their cooking process.
People decide when and what to cook every day. Aside from each recipe's desirability, time, and ingredients, dietary restrictions and preferences as well as the cook’s skill level in the kitchen all play critical roles in deciding what food to prepare.
By identifying homesickness as the motivation for cooking, we opened up conceptual possibilities with Crazy 8 sketches.
Illustrations imagined situational context, where youngsters evoke memories grounded indifferent places through receiving indigenous recipes from moms.
Our team conducted additional interviews with people back home (moms/dads), product walkthroughs with subject matter experts, and usability tests to further validate our design.
Multi-language support to make CookJam inclusive and accessible for hometown communities
In this project, I learned how comic book panels can be designed to change one's perception of time. By manipulating content, underlying motion, and overall experience, I mapped out visual sequences of users' interactions on a page, creating a user flow with a more intuitive and usable pace.
How do we make design inclusive? Once we settle on a few "one size fits one" ideas, we can zoom out and modify them by considering the permanent, temporary, and situational challenges users may have. Our initial idea was to connect students and their moms, but we decided to make it accessible to all friends and family.
Asking a good HMW (How Might We) question is crucial to how viable the solution will end up. To get a good HMW, we iterated our mission statements by asking "why" and "what's stopping the user now" for each. This process ultimately led us to adding an emotional layer to tackle "homesickness," giving us a chance to truly meet users’ needs with our solution.
