Healthy Eating Personal Kitchen Assistant
This was a speculative scholastic project focused on designing for bad habits. (September 2016)
Meet Chance!
The healthy eating personal kitchen assistant. Chance is the name of this tiny kitchen counter-top assistant who's goals are to help you learn to eat and cook healthier while optimizing the food you have in your fridge. He is part of a smart kitchen that can track and order food and syncs with healthy eating goals and nutritional and dietary restrictions.
Chance, the healthy eating personal kitchen assistant
Design Question:
How might we help young, urban professionals achieve their healthy eating goals?
Initial Research:
Survey (76 participants)
Semi-Structured Interviews (5 participants)
Contextual Inquiry (3 participants)
Findings:
Health Goals:
70% of survey participants weren't achieving health-related goals
100% of semi-structured interview and contextual inquiry participants weren't achieving health-related goals.
4/5 semi structured interview participants said that they wanted to eat healthier.
2/3 contextual inquiry participants reported not cooking at home more than 1-2 nights a week.
Reasons people weren’t achieving their healthy eating goals:
Fatigue after work
Being social and going out after work instead of cooking
Lack of time management and not knowing how to break cooking into attainable tasks
Lack of basic cooking skills and knowledge
DESIGN Principles:
Help people with time management and streamlining tasks
Reduce some of the cognitive load of learning new cooking skills
Make cooking approachable
Personalize the cooking process to likes/dislikes and allergies.
Personas:
ideation
Out of 30 ideation sketches, our three main ideas were
Bio Monitoring 'tattoo' that tracks nutrition and suggests needed foods
3D printed ingredients for recipies
Chance! The personal healthy eating kitchen assistant!
Prototype
Working from a mood-board we created a cardboard and then more high-fidelity prototype. We also prototyped an on-boarding experience for a companion app and a voice flow for three tasks.
KEY FEATURES:
Can recite recipes and teach people how to cook
Suggests recipes based on things in the fridge
Can order food from delivery services if need be
Eyes are cameras
Syncs to smartphone app that helps run analytics / find recipes
Creating flows for the voice interactions with Chance for testing.
User Testing
We conducted user testing with paper prototypes of user interfaces for the on-boarding experience as well as voice sequences with the personal kitchen assistant.
Our main findings were that:
The Out of Box Experience needed more details around permissions, and offered information about the additional services that could be connected to Chance (Amazon Fresh, InstaCart, etc).
The voice UX was changed to offer menu options one by one rather than a barrage of 10 options — participants got confused with too many options without enough time to think them through and decide.
My main takeaway was that voice controlled interfaces are pretty complex and not very 'smart' yet. Probably due to interactions with AIs like Alexa, people know that there are certain phrases that work really well and some that don't. People aren't sure what they can and cannot say to the AI, they assume there are correct answers they must use to get information so there isn't really a 'natural' feeling to conversation.
Final Deliverable
Figuring out what to cook and ordering food
Cooking
Out of box User interface
