KitchenMate App
Designing a smart kitchen assistant for the Amazon Echo Show
Project Timeline
Overview
KitchenMate is a smart kitchen assistant designed for the Amazon Echo Show 8 (2nd Gen) to promote healthier living and sustainability. The app helps users track food intake, reduce waste, and plan meals efficiently, with features tailored to diverse dietary needs and levels of cooking expertise.
Key Features:
Barcode Scanner: Tracks nutrition and suggests recipes based on pantry items.
Meal Planner: Offers customizable options and sustainable suggestions.
Accessibility Integration: Designed for Echo Show’s voice and touch interfaces to enhance usability.
Problem Statement
How might we design an app that simplifies meal planning, encourages sustainable habits, and reduces food waste, while being intuitive for diverse user groups?
Research
Conducted 12 user interviews and 2 observations to understand grocery habits, cooking challenges, and sustainability awareness:
Users were found to often waste food due to poor meal planning or unfamiliarity with recipes.
Identified a need for simplified, relatable guidance to support healthier and more sustainable habits.
Target Users: Young professionals, parents, and individuals seeking healthier, eco-conscious lifestyles.
Affinity Diagram:
Organized pain points and opportunities into themes: meal planning challenges, sustainability awareness, and time constraints.
Personas:
Frank: A busy professional seeking quick and healthy meal solutions to avoid food waste.
Anna: A parent balancing her child’s diet preferences with a desire to promote healthy eating and sustainability.
Design Process
Storyboards
Frank’s Journey: After a tiring day, Frank struggles with leftovers and ends up ordering unhealthy takeout. KitchenMate helps him create a healthy meal using available ingredients, reducing waste and improving his diet.
Anna’s Journey: Anna uses KitchenMate to plan a veggie burger meal her child enjoys, overcoming challenges with junk food and teaching sustainable habits.
Wireframes & Prototypes:
Developed high-fidelity prototypes optimized for Echo Show’s unique screen resolution and voice interaction capabilities.
Meal Planning Tools:
Users can input pantry items, track low stock, and receive recipe suggestions based on current groceries.
Integrated a barcode scanner to assess nutrition and suggest healthier alternatives.
Navigation and Personalization:
Created profiles tailored to dietary preferences and sustainability goals.
Ensured multiple paths to key features, such as recipe suggestions and pantry tracking, to enhance user experience.
Challenges
User Feedback: Participants requested more vibrant colours and clearer functionality demonstrations.
Solution: Enhanced the prototype with visually engaging elements and streamlined onboarding to simplify app understanding.
Outcomes
Improved Meal Planning: Enabled users to minimize waste by creating recipes based on pantry items.
Increased Accessibility: Echo Show integration improved usability, particularly for individuals with disabilities or limited tech skills.
Sustainability Awareness: Encouraged eco-friendly behaviours through the reward system and educational content.
Final Amazon Echo Design of KitchenMate App
Key Takeaways
Empathy in Design: Storyboarding and persona development helped address user challenges effectively.
Iterative Prototyping: User feedback drove improvements in visual design and interaction flow, ensuring alignment with user needs.