I participated in UX Laurier's 48 hour design-a-thon. Out of 130+ participants, my team won the "Most Innovative Solution" award. I have always been passionate about designing creative, yet impactful solutions; therefore, receiving this title was truly rewarding.
How might we intentionally explore what matters to us?
When given the design-a-thon prompt, I automatically thought about how love for food and how it drives me. As someone who loves cooking and trying new restaurants of various cuisines, I am greatly appreciative of the multicultural make-up of Canada, and more specifically, Toronto. This diversity gives meaning to us as individuals and drives creativity. This led me to think about how food acts an international language even though various culture have their own unique style. As a result, my team wanted to explore how others experience cooking new cuisines.
We found that while people want to try cooking new foods, they encounter difficulty entering spaces unfamiliar to them.
Lead Product Designer
48 hours
Figma
FigJam
Google Slides
How might we increase authenticity and opportunities for others to explore the rich food culture around them?
Wanting to explore international cuisines can be intimidating as it can be difficult to know where to find authentic ingredients and what they are.
Gocery is an app that allows users to locate ingredients and stores that sell international goods. This app was created to increase accessibility and ease of locating unfamiliar items.
Research participants expressed they encounter difficulty locating stores & authentic ingredients to cook international cuisines.
Users can use the search function to find country/culture specific stores or ones that carry a certain ingredient. Stores will also contain tags to indicate goods sold.
Users can easily find stores and ingredients they need to cook the dish they want.
Exploring a new cuisine can be daunting as there are ingredients and terms unfamiliar to the user.
Users can look for items using anglicized terms. Additionally, both anglicized and romanized forms of the item will be displayed.
Make trying unfamiliar foods less intimidating and allow users to expand their knowledge on various cuisines.
Under a tight time constraint, I conducted user interviews on three individuals who were interested in cooking cuisines from around the world.
Since participants are not familiar with the cuisine, they are unsure of which stores would provide the ingredients they need.
They prefer not to substitute since it can alter the dish's authenticity significantly.
Sometimes, participants will search for a specific ingredient at a grocery store, but find that it is not in stock.
Search engine results can be too generalized, inaccurate, and lack of details.
"When I canβt find the ingredients I need, I lose motivation because I canβt follow the recipe precisely and authentically."
We conducted a brief competitive analysis of existing alternatives, such as Google Maps to locate international grocery stores. From our interviews, we realized a user's first instinct when locating international grocery stores is to use Google. Therefore, we decided to search up "Korean grocery store" and note the accuracy of the results.
Out of the first 10 searches based on my location, only 5 primarily sold Korean goods. We also noted that results can vary greatly depending on the user's location.
Google's "Asian grocery store" label is too ambiguous as it includes stores that sell South Asian, Filipino, and Chinese products.
Using insights from the user interviews and Google analysis, we created a persona to further build empathy and ensure that we were designing for our goal demographic.
Once we decided which features would best address pain points, I quickly sketched a lo-fi prototype to map out the functions. I then began to iterate and build the hi-fi prototype with less than 24 hours left. With 1 hour to spare, we managed to finish the hi-fi prototype, just in time for presentation.
My team consisted of two members, while other groups had up to four. Since we had less hands on deck, we had to do much more work. I found that by time blocking and adhering to a schedule, we were able to get everything done on time. Overall, I am very proud of the product and competition results!
Going into this design-a-thon, I knew it was going to be challenging and something out of my comfort zone. I usually like to take my time while designing to make things pixel-perfect. However, this event taught me that I can rise to the occasion and am much more capable than I think.
My goal was to conduct at least two usability testings with my hi-fi prototype to gain insight on what users thought of the product. Although I did not end up having enough time, my next step would be to conduct testing in order to further iterate.
Due to the nature of the design-a-thon, I was not able to interview as many representative users as I would have liked. Next time, I will incorporate other methods of user research, such as surveys. They're simple and fast to conduct, making it easy to obtain larger amounts of raw data.
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