A Design Thinking Project- Cook Easy
We started with a broad subject area: Nutrition & Health: Providing education for cooking basics. Given this, my team and I explored the problem space, narrowed our focus toward a specific issue, and then iteratively and collaboratively came up with a solution. As a team, we learned the value of slowing down and not jumping to a solution, the value of watching and talking to possible users, and the value of segmenting the design process into a series of well thought out stages. ​
Design Question:
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First, we needed to narrow our focus. Nutrition & Health is too broad a subject for us to address constructively. So my team and I directed our attention to a population that we all knew well. Students at the University of Washington. With this in mind, we were able to refine the problem space by defining a design question:
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How can we make it easier to teach UW students who have no/little cooking experience the basic cooking skills needed to make a meal once a week?
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This beginning design question was useful in focusing our thoughts. We had a population of users: Students at the University of Washington; we had a goal: to teach our users basic cooking skills; and we had an early metric of success: to allow these students to make a meal once a week.
The Search For Previously Done Research:
Our next step was to confirm that this was a legitimate problem. We thus went about searching for previously done research. In general, the findings backed up our initial assumption that college students have poor eating habits. This research is summarized below:​
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“Almost one-quarter of students gained a significant amount of weight during their first semester of college.” [3]
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Students tend to eat cheaply and quickly, often foregoing healthier alternatives. [2]
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Unbalanced nutrition can lead to lower academic performance [6] and sleep problems [4] in the short term.
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Unbalanced nutrition can lead to heart disease [4, 1] and obesity [6, 1] in the long term.
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Increased knowledge in cooking causes students to cook more regularly [4]
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Compared to other alternatives, cooking is a quicker, healthier and cheaper option once the subject is more knowledgeable in cooking. [4, 1]
Observational Field Studies:
The next step in our design thinking process, was for each member of the team to observe a different UW student cook a meal within their own homes. These observational studies were very hands off. We did not speak to the subjects unless needed, and instead simply watched as they prepared a meal.
In these field studies, we primarily found messy but well-stocked kitchens. The kitchens had everything we could identify as being necessary to cooking full meals, including appliances, utensils, ingredients, and space. In their cooking, we found that the students primarily stuck to cooking simple and quick meals, reinforcing the idea from our secondary research that time is a crucial factor in students’ decision to cook. The dishes we observed students cooking ranged from fairly healthy, such as eggs, to extremely unhealthy, such as deep-frying frozen pizza.
Survey Research
Our next step was to design a survey for our target users. Our survey was given to UW students, distributed both in-person and through online channels (Slack, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Groups). We designed each survey question in order to better illuminate some unknowns we had about UW students and their cooking habits. The survey first asked some demographic questions to allow us to identify user groupings. We then provided three sets of questions: the first set focused on cooking tools, and if users could benefit from having more available to them; the second set was focused on their cooking skills, and if users would benefit from cooking education; the last set focused on possible types of solutions, such as apps or workshops. Here is a brief summary of our key findings:
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Students prefer to spend 30 minutes or less on cooking.
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Students say that unclear instruction and a lack of equipment are their biggest pain points.
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Most users learned to cook from their families or by themselves.
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Users want detailed recipes and instructions on basic cooking skills.
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Users say they are willing to experiment with new dishes.
Reflecting back, I feel that we approached the survey with too broad a mindset. We should have narrowed in towards a solution more so beforehand. This problem became evident as a few of the survey questions ended up not helping us at all.
Survey data visualizations - Cook Easy
Investigation and Analysis:
After we had gathered all of this data we needed to analyze it. We did this in two main ways. We performed an Affinity Analysis and a Qualitative Analysis. An affinity analysis involves listing all of our findings onto post-it notes. We then start grouping these findings and drawing associations between them. This is an easy way to get ideas flowing and create an overview of what we know. After this, we performed a Qualitative analysis by putting all of our survey data into excel. We then used various data science techniques to find patterns in this data, allowing us to draw some broad conclusions.
Design Requirements:
Given our analyses, my team and I then refined our design question to: How can we make it easier to provide UW students, who have beginner or intermediate level cooking experience, the skills, and tools needed to make meals quicker and more efficiently?
Given this, we also created a set of requirements for our solution. A summary of these requirements are as follows:
1. Time-saving, fast cooking
2. Simple recipes with clear instructions
3. Encourage users to cook more
4. Accessible for all UW students
5. Least impact on user habit/schedule
6. Suitable for most kitchens, minimum tools required
7. Entire solutions costs < $10,000
User Groupings:
Those requirements are useful constraints on our thinking, but before we jump to a solution, we have to consider the different user groupings that our solution is intended to positively impact. To this end, we created three fictional characters to represent three of the largest user groups. This is a useful exercise to understand the scale of any solution and who exactly it is targeting. Our user group characters were Florian, Jonas, and Lucy. Florian is a busy graduate student with very little time or patience for cooking. Jonas is an undergraduate who has relatively more time and wants to learn how to cook some basic recipes. Finally, Lucy wants to cook to impress. She wants to know how to cook for fantastic taste and presentation.
My Group and I further explored these user groupings by writing short stories about our character's cooking concerns and pain points. We also drew some cartoons to visually explain how we wanted our solution to effect our character's cooking habits and concerns. Below is my cartoon, storyboard.
Brainstorming Solutions:
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It was at this point that my group and I felt that brainstorming solutions was required. We each separately came up with a list of ideas. We then presented these ideas to each other and proceeded with a round of collaborative brainstorming. We came up with a number of good ideas that would address the design problem. One strong contender was an app that gamified the cooking process. In the end, however, we decided that such a solution would be too expensive for our budget and wouldn't achieve the same results as our chosen solution. Below is my list of ideas, and a summary of the brainstorming session.
Solution Chosen:
Idea: A freshman cooking course where each week freshmen receive a meal kit and illustrated recipe in comic book form, in order to teach them how to cook. There is no class time, they only need to submit photos of themselves cooking the meals that we sent out to them.
Strengths: Our idea will be able to reach virtually all UW students and impart practical experience in cooking while being time-considerate, information salient, and entertaining. We could build upon existing distribution systems within UW or through partnerships with existing meal kit preparers, such as Blue Apron or supermarkets.
Weaknesses: Our idea has a high cost of resources (for meal kit ingredients). We hope to address this through a course fee or meal plan revenue. We foresee the primary weakness being the effort it will take to get the UW administration to approve this course.
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Prototyping:
Now that we had chosen a solution we had to prototype it. This is in order to determine it's feasibility, how users interact with it and find any issues. Now we couldn't prototype the entire class due to resource and time constraints. We could, however, test the idea of specializing a meal kit and recipe for college students. To do this we referred back to our previous studies of college students and what they wanted out of their cooking. Students highlighted that speed, ease, and clarity was essential. To this end we took a Blue Apron recipe and significantly shortened it. We then created the recipe book in a simplistic comic style design that clearly illustrated each step in the cooking process.
Testing
We next needed to test our prototype. We did three trials with this paper prototype with graduate students. The paper prototype was good for getting an initial feel of how students would interact with our solution. It allowed us to cheaply find any simple mistakes, to test usability in a low-stress situation, and to probe for possible improvements. We made fake cardboard tools such as an oven, stove, cutting board, and various utensils. We also made fake paper ingredients for each of the various stages in the cooking process such as uncooked and cooked pork, cut and uncut cabbage.
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We also felt that it was necessary to have one test that was done with real ingredients in a real kitchen scenario with a real undergraduate student. This is because a large portion of the difficulty for beginner cooks is in the details, the fast pace, and the stress that can only be experienced in the kitchen. So we had my undergraduate brother, a relatively inexperienced cook, to follow our recipe and cook us dinner!
Adjustments and Improvements:
Due to our prototyping and testing, we found a couple of areas of improvement. First and most importantly we found that many of our users were not actually reading the recipe but skimming through it. To account for this we want to suggest to the user to read the recipe before cooking. In order to aid in the inevitable skimming, we also want to bold and color all important words and add further pictures to clear up some common points of failure. We also found in our testing that despite our attempts to reduce the time of cooking, students were still taking too long to cook the meal. We decided then to further reduce the complexity and time commitment of the recipe by cooking the onions with the meat, instead of in the oven. Despite these and a few other smaller problems, we think that our specialize recipe design added value for the student cooks.
Evaluation:
During our prototyping, we also asked our participants questions about our solution. All participants said they would enjoy such a cooking class. All participants agreed that our cooking course would go a long way in solving the original problem of students not cooking and eating unhealthily.
Conclusion:
We started this assignment by creating a Design Question: How can we make it easier to teach UW students who have no/little cooking experience the basic cooking skills needed to make a meal once a week? We ended with a Design Solution. A Blue Apron style cooking course specialized for students to cook quickly, cheaply, and efficiently.
Areas to Improve: We feel that we could have done more secondary research and that we should’ve narrowed our requirements before writing the survey.
Lessons Learned: As a team we learned the value of slowing down, investigating the problem space, watching and talking to possible users, narrowing down the core problems, and then iteratively and collaboratively coming up with a solution.