Overview
Fryj allows users to store the contents of their refrigerators in a mobile app. Having digital versions of these food items allows users to make the most of what they own by suggesting recipes that can be created, and ensuring that no food goes to waste.
Duration
2 Weeks
Role
UX Designer
UX Researcher
Visual Designer
Tools
Pen
Sketch
Invision
Project
Individual Project
Design Overview
Design Process
Fryj is the culmination of an iterative process of researching, ideating and mocking-up prototypes.
How the idea formed…
It all began when I was having a simple conversation with my sister-in-law, Alexis. This was in the midst of COVID-19 so the topic turned to home life. She mentioned that she has been struggling to adapt to cooking every meal at home. Her main problem was figuring out how to organize her refrigerator, because she feels so guilty when she has to throw expired food away. I asked her, “what if there was a way for you to organize your refrigerator with a digital version so you would always know what you have and when it expires? Would you use it?” After this call, I reached out to a few friends to ask them similar questions and see if this idea had legs.
Over my conversations, I learned that there was definitely a lot of interest in this idea. It seemed like everyone had felt the frustration of being forced to cook on a daily basis due to COVID-19. I realized that this idea was worth further pursuance.
User Research
I decided to create a formal interview process with 6 user interviews.
Questions designed to better understand each user’s experience with cooking, organizing their refrigerator and looking for new recipes.
Interviews were conducted over Zoom calls where I recorded each call and took notes
Affinity Mapping
For my findings, all 6 of the participants have shared that they love to explore new recipes. And 5 of the 6 people said that they hate wasting food. I converted my written notes into sticky notes so that I could simplify and organize the various pain points into a few common themes.
“I don’t know how to organize my fridge, help!”
— Julia
Research
Literature Review
It is important for me that my ideas have a positive social impact. In parallel with my user research, I found research papers and articles that enlightened me on the major issue of food waste. Ultimately I found 6 research papers that helped me understand the root cause of food waste and the resulting environmental and social impacts.
Key Insights
52% of those surveyed report that their food had expired before ever being consumed
of food produce is wasted every year in the U.S
5/6 of users from user interviews said they need help organizing their refrigerator
amount that American households waste in food every year
Food waste that ends up in landfills will produce methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times as potent as carbon dioxide
It does not end with food waste, the entire lifecycle of food production is wasted as well from water, to land, to plastics
Define
Problem Forming
Users need a way to always have a snapshot of the contents in their refrigerator.
Opportunities
How might we organize the refrigerator for users?
Remind users that ingredients are expiring
Provide recipes that users can make
Help users make grocery shopping more efficient
Ideation
Persona
Once I analyzed all my findings from the user research, I created two personas with different backgrounds that are a blend of the users I interviewed. The goal of creating these personas is to ensure my design process remains on target with my user’s pain points.
27, Software Engineer
Jason Williams
About
Jason is a software engineer in San Francisco, California. He lives with his girlfriend and their puppy. He loves to spend his free time cooking and eating out at trendy restaurants with friends and family. Because of his love of food, he and his girlfriend are always buying groceries to try new recipes. However, they are always over-buying ingredients and wasting them.
Goals
Track his refrigerator’s inventory
Prevent food from expiring
Frustrations
Buying too many groceries
Feels guilty about wasting food
About
Alison is a fashion buyer living in Birmingham, Alabama. Besides working as a buyer, she’s also trying to be a cooking influencer in social media. She loves to explore new recipes and share her new learning online. However, due to her busy schedule working at her full-time job. She often doesn’t have time to organize her refrigerator after she cooks. She’s been struggling to deal with her mess refrigerator and constantly feels stressed about this.
Goals
Find new and unique recipes she can cook and share
Keep the refrigerator clean and organized
Frustrations
Constantly stressed about refrigerator organization
Difficulty connecting with other food loving people online
25, Fashion Buyer
Alison Jones
Solution
Create a mobile app that helps users avoid wasting food. The features that will included include: a digital refrigerator with icons for current ingredients, a reminder/notification system for expiring foods, and a built-in recipe resource that can pull recipes that use the ingredients that users have on-hand.
Sketches
Proposal A
I was able to sketch a couple ideas.
The key features of this first ideation are: using machine vision to scan receipts when adding food into your refrigerator, organizing the on-hand ingredients in the fridge with fun icons, connecting shopping apps such as Instacart to make grocery shopping easy, and an expiring food notification feature.
Proposal B
After I finished my first ideation, I then created a sketch prototype to test with my peers to gain feedback before moving on to a wireframe.
Key feedback
Simplify my features because the app has too many different features that could overwhelm the user
Make the expiring food notification more obvious
Key changes
With this feedback, I then made some design changes.
Added a feature to manually add food instead of scanning a receipt. This feature included: a food search bar for quick lookups, an expiration date input, on/off alarm notification for expiration, and a quantity input
Added a ‘My Fridge’ page with a recipe search filter. The recipe search filter allows users to search for types of dishes and cuisines and see if they have a match with their available ingredients.
Added fun elements in the profile page. Cooking is often a social activity with users posting their dishes to social media outlets like Instagram. This feature allows users to create a profile with their favorite recipes and ingredients to share with their friends.
Information Architecture
To make sure that Fryj remained simple for users, I focused on the app’s information architecture by creating the diagram below.
Test & Iterate
After the medium-fidelity prototypes were done, I recruited five potential users to do usability testing. They were asked to perform certain tasks on Zoom. After observing them perform the tasks, they provided feedback in a Q&A section.
Tasks
Use the recipe search filter to find your favorite recipes
Add ingredients to your refrigerator by using the Add page
Key findings
Users thought it was useful but were concerned that they would not want to do this in the long term because it could become another chore of adding and removing food in the app every time they used their refrigerator.
The time to cook feature on the search filter page is not clear and difficult to find.
Design Changes
The original “Time to cook” button uses a scroll interface that users were not sure how to use.
New design relies on a simple select interface that relies on large discrete time increments. Every user commented that the new design is much easier to understand.
Changed the color scheme from bright yellow to white, which better demonstrates a clean and minimal aesthetic
Added output “X” button and provided two options for users to easily subtract food from their inventory. Options now include: delete by quantity or delete all
Hi-fidelity Prototype
Recipe use and ingredient removal user flow
A user flow is demonstrated starting with selecting on-hand ingredients from your refrigerator and finding the top recipes that can be made with these ingredients. After the recipe has been cooked, users can give it a rating and delete the ingredients that were used from their digital inventory.
Another option to find recipes is by looking at recipes favorited by friends or through a discover page with the top recipes of the day.
Manual input of ingredients user flow
A user flow of adding new groceries to your refrigerator inventory.
Key features on this flow
Expiration date reminder with message and alarm choices
Auto filling search bar to save time inputting ingredients
Final product
Improvement
Further user interviews revealed another insight. Users often cook recipes by watching videos. Based on this insight, I created a tablet version of Fryj to make video viewing easier.
Next steps
My high-fidelity prototype is finished and I want to continue developing it. My next step will be to reach out to a mobile app developer to create a working prototype of the base feature of Fryj, the digital inventory. I focus here because I believe that perfecting the mechanics of adding and subtracting ingredients so that it is less of a chore for users will be the key hurdle to overcome. I can then run user testing to understand people’s willingness to use Fryj on a daily basis.