HomeCooked
Designing a time efficient application that tackles food waste.
This project initially started at a design hackathon. The first iteration was created to compete, then I took this idea and iterated on it again for another competition CMBA Product Development Competition.
Role
UI/UX Designer & Team Lead
Duration
2 months
Tools
Figma
Google Suite
♜ Overall Problem Space
US households waste about ⅓ of the food purchased every year.
Especially with the rise of COVID and stay at home regulations, more people are cooking at home. It gets harder and harder to think of good recipes that are delicious, not repetitive or wasteful.
According to Feeding America, 108 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States yearly. That's about 130 billion meals and more than $408 billion in food thrown away each year. Nearly 40% of all food in America is wasted. That's a lot of food.
⚉ Solution
With HomeCooked, users can…
Get Tailored Recipes
Based off the ingredients that users have in their pantry and the closest expiration dates, HomeCooked produces tailored recipes that help users find things to cook quickly, easily, and without waste.
Easily Scan Receipts
We know it can be hard to update ingredients all the time. HomeCooked has a scanning feature where users can take a picture of their receipt and the ingredients are automatically inputted into the pantry.
☌ Research
What do other food waste applications do? Competitive Analysis.
To start our research phase, we looked at other food waste based applications, analyzing their features to better guide what areas they target and find areas to differentiate ourselves. Many of the most famous applications are geographically limited — it does not apply to those who might not be close to specific stores that sells the produce or the delivery service does not deliver to that area.
We want to create an application that focuses on accessibility -- everyone can use this app no matter the geographic area.
This led us to the kitchen area, a very universal area, where cooking and waste often happens in the household.
Those who cook also targets the most amount of people, attempting to make food waste reduction habits a common experience.
Understanding and validating the problem.
Especially because food waste is not a commonly discussed topic, we wanted to both understand and validate that food waste awareness is something that people want to incorporate in their cooking lives.
We surveyed 9 people and interviewed 3 people ages 15-51+ years old on the decisions they make when cooking and their food waste habits.
90% said that they do not think about how much food they waste in their daily lives but would like to reduce their waste if possible.
However, an overwhelming sentiment that we found in the interviews was that
Many young people skip cooking because it feels time‑consuming—not just the cooking itself, but the planning, deciding what to make, and shopping that come before it.
⛅︎ Ideation
Ideas to Concept. Ideation.
From our research, we saw that we could possibly hit two birds with one stone. Assuming that we can improve the cooking process while also including food waste reduction habits seamlessly into this process, then we could allow for food waste minimization to be a more effective integration into everyday life.
How might we improve the cooking process while simultaneously including food waste reduction habits?
Understanding who we're designing for.
To help us get started ideating, we created a user persona to provide us with some direction in who we might be designing for and for us to keep in mind as we create our ideas.
✦ So ultimately,
How can we reduce the cognitive load for all of these steps for a typical user (grocery shopping, thinking about what to eat, finding recipes)?
☌ Consolidating into a single idea & thoroughly ideating against our competitors. Competitive Analysis #2.
Our overall idea was to create an application that goes hand in hand with the cooking process -- creating an easy and sustainable method for the cooking experience. We started creating features, but realized that there might be other competitors in the market who have these ideas. So, we decided to conduct another brief competitive analysis to best improve our application:
1. Efficiency on inputting ingredients.
2. Emphasis on reducing food waste.
✎ Starting designs.
Conducting user feedback.
After creating mid-fi wireframes, we conducted a user feedback session with 3 users, asking them to test out the prototype.
The overall ideas that we wanted to see were:
Is the flow clear?
Was there anything that they thought might be useful to add or change?
"I feel like this recipe is a lot to read."
"What if I don't know what I have and don't have?"
"I would want to know how much time each of these recipes take."
Does this actually make sense? Conducting user feedback.
After creating mid-fi wireframes, we conducted a user feedback session with 3 users, asking them to test out the prototype.
The overall ideas that we wanted to see were:
Is the flow clear?
Was there anything that they thought might be useful to add or change?
Before
After
Before
After
✦ The Product
Enhancing the cooking experience while simultaneously minimizing food waste.
⚉ Solution
With HomeCooked, users can…
Onboarding for easier conversion.
A short and quick onboarding allows for easier set up of the pantry and personalized recommendations for the user's homepage.
An easy way to save food.
After grocery shopping, people can take a picture of their receipt to easily input it into their pantry. Expiration dates of pantry foods are highlighted as the dates get closer.
A robust simplification of the cooking process: Ingredients, Reviews & Recipe.
To reduce the load and questions that users have to decide what to cook and eat, each recipe has a collection of information to help guide their decisions.
☀︎ Impact
This project has won XHacks, the yearly design hackathon at CMU, Best Pitch Award and 1st place at the Carnegie Mellon Business Association Product Development Competition.
✈︎ Takeaway
Business research for product design is key.
Gamification could make sustainable habits like reducing food waste more engaging and sticky.
Curious about something? ⌛︎
elizabethsqwang@gmail.com