MyPalate - Recipe App
Interaction Design
UX researcher, Myself
Design Thinking Process
Figma, Miro
One weeks
Why I decided to work on this project?
Finding a recipe that is compatible with your health has always been difficult to find. This issue get even more serious when you are a senior immigrant with health issues.
Nearly 4.6 million foreign-born adults ages 65 years and older live in the US. We saw this challenge as an opportunity to help senior immigrants with their recipe search.
When I heard about MyPalate redesign challenge, I decided to take part into it to provide the best solution. Because I was familiar with the issues senior immigrants (target audience) were having in search for a recipe compatible with their health. I worked with two other teammates (US Immigrants) to work on this 3 day challenge to provide an intuitive solution.
Key skills
User research, competitive analysis, personas, crazy 8, user flows, low fidelity wireframes, high fidelity wireframes and prototypes.
How might we retain customers and increase traffic by making relevant content easily discoverable without language barrier?
Why do we need a redesign?
Interviewing senior immigrants showed that the current design wasn’t intuitive enough and the user flow was time-taking and unsatisfying. And most of the senior immigrants were unable to use the app due to the language barrier.
Immigrants were also not satisfied with the current features that had. Because to find out the nutritional value or to see the health compatibility of a recipe, they have to return to other platforms.
We also interviewed product owner to understand business goals and to how they could be align with the problem immigrants are having while using the current design.
User insights
We got following results after interviewing the senior immigrants of USA having some food restrictions or dealing with other health issues.
Identifying our areas of focus
interviewing senior immigrants and product help us narrow down our area of focus to specify the problems we are going to solve. Following are the Problem we end up focusing in order to design a better user experience for elderly immigrants.
Understanding the familiar
After doing our primary research, we started looking for the competitors in the market to get an idea of how they are tackling the problems that we want to solve. We didn’t get all all the answers like how to remove the language barrier but we did got some pretty good ideas about how to solve other problems.
Let’s brainstorm some ideas!
Based on the insights from research, we started ideating to gather solution to our design problems. we sketched out 8 different ideas for each design problem. After analysing different solutions, we moved forward with the most viable and accessible solution.
Crazy-8 solutions
We used crazy-8 method to brainstorm all the possible solutions to our potential problems
Wireframes
After doing crazy-8, we worked on some potential usable solutions to draw low-fidelity wireframes.
Bringing ideas to life
We tried to provide the better design solution to help senior immigrant with different goals regarding the use of the MyPalate.
Language and Dietary Preference
Onboarding design allowed user to easily chose their preferred language and diets to have a personalised feed.
Substitutes for Restricted Ingredients
Design allowed users to easily find the ingredient substitutes by simply clicking on it.
Organised Collection
Collection page design and feature helped user to organize different recipes for quicker access instead of scrolling down to find their desired recipe.
Flexibility in Personalisation
Our design gave the user flexibility to edit their dietary preferences (add or remove them) at any time they want.
Moving Forward
Our design proved helpful not only for the senior immigrants with health issues but also for the people looking to improve their health and diet. As we move forward on this project, we want to make our designs more accessible through user testing and integration of new features such as store locator and social networking.
User Testing
Our next first step is to conduct a user testing to make sure that our design is accessible to our target audience without any usability issues.
Tracking Stores
For store locator, we want to give our users the ability to easily locate the stores that have their desired ingredients on their groceries list. This would give users the opportunity to save time rather than searching store by store for their ingredients.
Social Networking
From user interviews, we learned that users like to share their recipes with their friends and relatives. We would like to add a feature that would allow users to share their recipes with their network as well as build a community of online recipes.
From user interviews, we learned that users like to share their recipes with their friends and relatives. We would like to add a feature that would allow users to share their recipes with their network as well as build a community of online recipes.