KitchenMate, Health App
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.
Impact:
Achieved a 50% increase in successful recipe completion rates and a 40% improvement in accessibility scores. User testing showed KitchenMate’s guided interface made cooking feel more approachable and inclusive for beginners and neurodiverse users.
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.
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:
Organised 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.
Storyboard
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.
Wireframes & Prototypes:
Developed high-fidelity prototypes optimised 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 Personalisation
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.
Outcome
Improved Meal Planning: Enabled users to minimise 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.
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.
Next Steps
Launch the app to track the amount of time it takes users to complete tasks to confirm that the experience is intuitive To check how frequently people are using the app, what the drop off rates are, to see if users are using it consistently to form habits around healthy eating.
