KitchenMate App
Human-Computer Interaction Project
The KitchenMate App promotes healthy living and sustainability by helping users track food intake, reduce waste, and make healthier choices.
Designed for the Amazon Echo Show, it features a barcode scanner for tracking nutrition and suggesting recipes based on available ingredients. The app encourages mindful eating while making sustainability more accessible.
Project Timeline
Context
📋 Overview
KitchenMate is built using user-centered design principles, based on insights from interviews and observations.
The target audience includes young professionals and parents, with challenges like time constraints and varying levels of interest in sustainability. The app simplifies grocery management and meal planning, catering to users’ diverse dietary needs.
👩💻 Stakeholders
The primary stakeholders for the KitchenMate App include:
End Users: Young professionals, parents, and individuals with dietary goals, seeking healthier, more sustainable lifestyles.
Developers & Designers: Responsible for building and iterating the app to meet user needs, ensuring seamless interaction and integration with devices like the Amazon Echo Show.
Amazon: As the platform host (Echo Show), Amazon is a key partner in the app’s deployment, offering voice and touch interface support.
Grocery Retailers: Providing product data for the barcode scanner, enabling users to track the nutrition and sustainability of their groceries.
Health and Sustainability Advocates: Offering insights to promote healthier living and environmental consciousness, ensuring the app aligns with these values.
Problem
⚡️ The Challenge: How can users find recipes that meet their dietary needs while promoting healthy eating?
⚡️ The Challenge: How can the app educate users about sustainability to encourage more eco-friendly habits?
⚡️ The Challenge: What can be done to help users reduce food waste, addressing the various reasons behind it?
Design Process
📚 User Research
We conducted twelve semi-structured interviews and two user observations.
The interviews gave us various exciting insights about peoples' pain points in grocery shopping, cooking and attitudes towards sustainability.
The two observations were conducted both in a kitchen and a "zero waste" shop. The kitchen environment results show users cook familiar meals or pass down recipes.
The “zero waste” shop results show that users are empowered to adopt a much more waste-free lifestyle, promoting the filling and refilling containers from home, for their groceries.
D E S I G N
Affinity Diagram
Image of Affinity DIagram
D E S I G N
Personas
Image of Personas (Frank & Anna)
D E S I G N
Storyboard
Image of First Storyboard & Character Sketch
Image of Frank’s Storyboard
Story:
Franck, who just returned home from a long tiring workday. He finds himself hungry and unable to cook the remaining ingredients left in the fridge, which leads him to order takeout.
The next day he feels unwell from the food ordered and realizes that he needs a solution to this current lifestyle issue. Franck finds the app KitchenMate on his Echo Show and wonders if the features will help him be healthier and more sustainable while resolving the problems he has been facing. He registers and tries the app, where he has suggested a 5-minute recipe with ingredients found in his fridge.
After successfully making the meal, he is happy and very much hopeful he will not feel unwell because he knows what he is eating, following with less food waste, and saving money.
Image of Anna’s Storyboard
Story:
Anna’s day in her life. She is a mother to a little girl and the current problem she is facing is the diet of her daughter, who enjoys junk food more than anything else. In the story we see Anna doing her weekly grocery shopping and suggesting her daughter have veggie burgers for dinner. The daughter gets upset and wants to eat at McDonald which she has already done twice that week.
Anna defeated by the behaviour grants her wish. Anna is quite upset by this problem, especially because as a mom she wants her child to be healthy and perhaps teach her more about it along with sustainability. Anna finds the app on her home Echo Show and decides to try it out. She makes some veggie burgers in the time-space of 20 minutes. Her daughter surprisingly enjoys the meal and asks for it to be given the next day. Anna is happy and hopeful to carry on making healthy recipes for her daughter and to create a healthier diet.
Goals
D E S I G N
Provide the ability to track their food intake and sustainability progress
Featuring a barcode scanner to track levels of nutritional intake with further implementation such as alternative food, track of pantry food to reduce waste, formulate recipes with the current items
Meal planning with healthy options and sustainable suggestions
Reward system to encourage users to be consistent with the application
Features
D E S I G N
Create a personalized profile tailored to health goals, including dietary preferences, intolerances, and sustainability efforts.
Offer recipes based on the user’s cooking skill level.
Track progress toward health and sustainability goals with a reward system.
Plan meals efficiently with customizable options.
Manage pantry items by inputting current groceries, with features to track low stock, buy online, and find healthy, sustainable alternatives, while generating recipes.
Import and share recipe videos from social media platforms.
Flowchart
D I A G R A M S
Scenario: User finds and signs up to KitchenMate
Scenario: User adds groceries to the KitchenMate app and creates a recipe from it.
SiteMap
D I A G R A M S
D I A G R A M S
Wireframes
Final Amazon Echo Design of KitchenMate App
Challenge
A key challenge arose during a focus group session, where participants requested more vibrant colours for the components and a demonstration of a functional system. In response, we finalized the wireframe details and transitioned to developing high-fidelity prototypes to meet these expectations.
Outcomes
The KitchenMate App achieved its goals of promoting healthy living and sustainability by addressing user pain points through thoughtful design and functionality. The feedback from usability testing was integral in shaping the final prototype, ensuring that it met the needs of the target users while encouraging sustainable behaviours.
🥗 Improved Meal Planning and Waste Reduction
One of the primary outcomes was the app's ability to help users plan meals more effectively and reduce food waste. The barcode scanner and pantry system allowed users to track food items and receive recipe suggestions based on available ingredients. This feature not only simplified meal planning but also minimized food waste by encouraging users to utilize what they already had, addressing a common pain point in managing groceries.
✨Enhanced Accessibility and Usability
The integration with Amazon Echo Show’s voice features significantly improved the app’s accessibility, making it more user-friendly, particularly for those with disabilities or limited tech knowledge. The focus on user-centred design ensured that key features like the meal planner, sustainability tracker, and goal system were intuitive and easy to navigate, improving the overall user experience and engagement with the app.
Takeaways
During our usability testing, we discovered that some users, particularly those less familiar with technology, struggled to understand our concepts. They had difficulty grasping the device itself. This experience taught me the importance of empathy and the need to explain design and device details clearly, avoiding overly technical language.
✨Every user is unique