Time Crunch is a recipe app that allows users to plan healthy and convenient recipes. As the sole member, I led UX research, design, and usability testing for this project.
Throughout this project, I applied the fundamental principles of the Design Thinking Process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
Health experts agree that we should be eating less processed and fast foods. Through secondary research, I found that people often struggle with eating healthy meals due to factors such as:
My objective was to develop an application that is user-friendly and intuitive, while also providing an extensive database of healthy and quick recipes.
I wanted to understand the main issues with why people have difficulty cooking healthy meals. After receiving over 20 pieces of valuable feedback from user surveys and interviews, I was able to summarize my main findings:
I grouped the feedback using an affinity map and found common pain points, such as difficulties with cooking, health goals, struggles with healthy eating, food motivators, and user expectations with food.
My research showed two unique types of users: those that were too busy to cook, and those that were health conscious. To further understand my user needs and pain points, I distilled the research findings into empathy maps.
I created two distinct personas to understand the expectations, concerns, and motivations of my target users.
User stories allowed me to prioritize user needs and better define the necessary features and elements that needed to be implemented for a cohesive experience.
After identifying user needs and pain points, I began to generate ideas and establish concepts using pen and paper to explore possible solutions toward our user's problems.
Keeping our users' needs in mind, I decided that the MVP of my app should feature the ability for users to search for recipes, save them, and plan their meals using a calendar.
To map out key features that my app needed to include, I created a site map. I made note of important navigation elements based on my user stories.
I created three user flows for my app's MVP:
Sketching allowed me to see the different possibilities of my app. I wanted to focus on how to make the app simple, straightforward, and easy to read for users, while also encouraging users to explore recipe options by including plenty of pictures.
I began creating low fidelity wireframes based off of my sketches and user flows using Figma. Doing so helped clarify how I wanted functions spaced out on screen and identify key features. In this stage, I kept user needs, information architecture, and content hierarchy in mind.
I created a mood board to explore visual directions, develop a more robust brand platform, and establish brand identity. The UI inspiration was curated to elicit a sense of cleanliness, simplicity, and ease of use. Additionally, I utilized color psychology to invoke a blend of confidence, cheerfulness, reassurance, and hunger.
To make sure that everything ties in together, I created a style guide. Using the mood board as inspiration, I wanted to focus on colors, iconography, and fonts that highlighted Time Crunch’s attributes while also creating a standardized format for consistency. It was also crucial to keep accessibility in mind, so I picked font sizes that were readable and checked for contrast ratio.
I decided to remove some background graphics on the recipe screen to improve readability. I also realized that users might want to remove multiple favorite items at a time, so I added a button for users to edit their recipe list.
I recruited five participants to test a prototype of Time Crunch through moderated usability tests. Based on the results, I found 3 main issues.
Based on the feedback gathered from usability testing, I realized that I needed to improve the clarity for some of my features. Changes I made include:
After incorporating the changes to my mockups, I collected feedback from the same users, who were pleased with the improvements made. Overall, users noted an improvement in clarity and ease of use.
Below is an embedded prototype of the Time Crunch app made in Figma. Users were tasked with logging in, searching for a recipe (tofu salad), adding and removing favorite items, and planning dinner using the calendar.
Through research and gathering user feedback, I realized that features that are clear to designers may not be obvious for users, thus it is important to always be flexible because design is an iterative process. I’ve learned that keeping a user centric mindset is absolutely vital in design—it is important for users to feel confident in their decision making. With this in mind, it was essential for me to make data-driven design decisions.
In the future, I would like to improve on my visual design skills, as well as incorporating more best practices. Looking back, there are some things that could be designed with more usability in mind, such as adding input field labels for additional clarity and adding more padding between elements to reduce clutter.
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