Design With MLP(Most Lovable Product)
Case study overview
Summary:
As a Lead UX Designer, I was in charge of leading my team to create the first impression of a creative cooking application in a three-week design sprint.
Responsibility:
In an agile design environment, I focused on the client's priorities. I delivered high-quality prototypes to be presented to the investor to raise funding for the product launch.
Role:
UX designer / Visual designer
Timeline:
June 2021
What is Kitchen OS?
KitchenOS is a product that helps users to be more creative and efficient in the kitchen.
The app is geared towards enthusiastic home cooks who have some basic knowledge of cooking but desire to explore new flavors and techniques that create a delicious meal and customize it to the users' needs.
Story of KitchenOS and the Founder’s Vision
KitchenOS is an idea that Jake Meyer, the founder, has been developing for many years.
He is a passionate home cook and wants to build a platform to be more creative in the kitchen.
The app is geared towards enthusiastic home cooks who have some basic cooking knowledge but desire to explore new flavors and techniques.
As a UX Lead on this project, it was important for me and as well as for my client to understand the value of the product in the market.
But because this will be the first impression of the product, it was important to plan out the project to deliver love at first-sight product.
Project overview
Before diving into any research and design, I need to go over and create a functional team plan for the project.
This allows me to understand other designers' perspectives on the project but also helps the client to understand our design decision right from the start.
This not only is efficient in the sustainability of the project but also simply creates empathy for the team so that when the obstacles come supporting the team becomes natural.
Reducing stress for designers and all the stakeholders and helps to move the project not only from A to B but fluently through different directions within the design without having to lose focus and goal.
Design MLP (Most Lovable Product)
Planning to design MLP from the very start of the project helps to keep the design thinking of the user and be able to deliver high-quality deliverables and prototypes in a short time.
Thinking of creating MLP from the very start can be intimidating and might feel burdened for the designers.
Still, creating a well-structured team functional plan and detailed project planning helped make the MLP possible and pursuable in a short design sprint.
Competitive analysis
Understanding the competitor market is one of the most important research to be done before diving into design.
I must understand what the competitors are offering in their design as well as product features to be able to differentiate KitchenOS from other competitors in the market.
These are crucial steps for a startup because competitive market research will determine the direct competitor to KitchenOS.
When delivering design, it needs to leverage above from the competitor's designs and features as well.
Comparative Analysis
For our comparative analysis, we looked at products like Adidas Training, Netflix, and Duolingo.
I wanted to explore these specific apps for the A.I. learning and personalization factor of the product.
Helping users to feel welcomed to their personalized product was the goal of this analysis.
Through this research, I learned that when a product is more personal and speaks directly to the user, the return rate and dependency of the product could be higher.
And wanted to learn more about personalization and test the product.
Persona
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Because of her specific healthy diet, she needs different ways to make meals so it’s not the same thing every night.
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Needs to be confident that she can make a creative and healthy meal with what she has in her kitchen without taking too much time to plan.
Lucy Abigail
Age: 34
Interior designer
New York City, NY
"I enjoy experimenting with flavor while cooking."
Goals & Needs
Personality
Pain Point
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Her specific healthy diet can be restrictive on the variety of meals she can create.
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Shopping for healthy foods can be time-consuming
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Feels good about herself when she makes a home-cooked meal because she knows she’s taking care of her body.
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She’s tired of making the same meals but doesn’t have the patience or time to risk experimenting with new dishes.
Design studio workshops
My goal for this design studio was 'how can we help users to create meals with a single ingredient and be creative in creating a dish' with clear vision from founder himself.
Within 6 minutes of sketching, we came up with a variety of ideas and sketches.
From this design studio, I got the idea of a Hero Ingredient where users get to choose an ingredient and build a dish around that specific ingredient.
We also thought about substituting and replacing an ingredient on a dish was something that would help users feel creative and helpful in creating a delicious meal.
What I take notes on during these design sessions is to notice patterns within all of our designs.
With a clear idea of the design process and clear insight from the founder, it was clear to my team and me how we would create a user flow.
At first, I created several different user flows for different process steps and tried to figure out how users could access all the different user flows into one.
The reason behind this was that if I were able to make users go through one user flow to experience many features that the product provides, it would make the user easier to understand the product from the start and also be able to educate the user on how to use the product by going through one user flow.
User flows
Critical user journey
Understanding the user's pain point as well as green path moments helps us, designers, to explain the problems that we are trying to solve.
This helps to keep everyone understanding of a scenario and deeper empathy for our persona.
My journey map gives a clear goal where our solution can be implemented to bring changes to users' behavior.
The pain point of the user and where KitchenOS comes as a solution is offering a meal created using features from KitchOS to cook a meal using the ingredients that the user has in their pantry.
Wireframes
In this wireframe, it was important to be very clear to our users of their purpose of using the product but make it easy and simple to get to know the product as soon as possible.
And because KitchenOS is a user-personalized product, it was important for the product to get to know the user right on the onboarding so that once they got set up in the app, KitchenOS could customize it according to the user.
Also, users can customize their inputs to know what they are customizing and give feedback with information on the user's actions. Because Lucy likes to be healthy and create healthy meals, she will substitute and customize her meals to create a nutritious meal according to her liking. Our users need to be creative in their cooking and not follow just any recipe to create meals.
Usability testing 1st round
With the above wireframe, our team conducted a total of 3 usability tests.
Our target users were users who cooked an average of 7 times a week and were enthusiastic about cooking at home.
I gave them a simple body storming to help the user get into the scene as a user of KitchenOS.
With this technique, I was able to give the user as much freedom to explore and observe the user without distracting the user in between the testing.
The usability testing proved to us that the onboarding process and adding the ingredients into the pantry was not a difficult task.
All of our users completed those two steps within 2 minutes.
Key insights
The area where our user found difficult was on the onboarding where the user had to input their cooking proficiency.
It was hard for the user to judge their own cooking skills and it raised more questions.
The user asked themselves “If I'm an Expert, am I cooking for a restaurant-ready dish?”
Styling guide
Implementing a styling guide for a product that has not been launched puts a lot of pressure on the designers because this will be the first impression that the users and stakeholders will have about KitchenOS.
As a designer, I wanted to give much more focus on the functionality of the product within the short design sprint. This does not mean that the visual design can be left out.
But instead, I pushed to have a more minimal but effective design language to give a more clear message to the users.
Prototype
Creating a working prototype was one of the most important deliverables that I had to create for our client. Our founder wanted to use this specific prototype to present to the investors to collect funding to proceed to the next step.
Because this information was given to me at the very early stage of the project, creating a functioning prototype was not enough.
But also creating a visually pleasing prototype was inevitable.
And because my team had agreed to follow the MLP process creating a visually pleasing prototype was a much easier process.
Creating well-processed wireframe and visually pleasing design system helped to create this prototype.
Usability testing 2nd round
Similar to our first target user, the users cooked on average of 5-7 times a week and surprisingly they were able to complete the onboarding in an average of 1 minute and 10 seconds.
This showed that visual design was effective and our users were able to understand the process easier.
Also, adding the ingredients to the pantry and moving to the cooking screen only took 1 minute. 66% of our users were unsure of the cooking proficiency in the first round of usability testing but after I had effectively changed the instruction of the screen our users were able to understand that it was not the cooking proficiency that we were asking for but asking what kind of meals they prefer to make so that users aren’t forced to do a self-evaluation and be hesitant or confused on where their cooking skills.
Key insights
The interesting insight I received through the testing was that the user wanted to know if the ingredients would go bad and how the application could track ingredients that were about to expire.
What I learned as a UX designer
The biggest takeaway from this design work was working with a client in the very early stage of launching the product.
As a UX designer, I wanted to help validate the client/founders' vision with research and deliver a design that was user-focused.
And through this process, I learned that UX design can not only provide valuable deliverables in the early stage of product launch but also create a design system that will guide and help future designers to help KitchenOS grow.
It was a valuable experience working with KitchenOS and my design team and I cannot thank enough all the stakeholders and my team enough to make this project possible.
Thank you for reading my experience and my case study on KitchenOS.
