ROLE

UI / UX Designer

PROJECT TYPE

Team project at BCIT

YEAR

2021

During my fourth semester at BCIT, we were tasked with designing a simple social media platform for a niche community. Working alongside a team of developers and designers, we came up with ChefSpace; a cooking social media app. The purpose of ChefSpace is to provide a space for chefs of different skill levels to come together and help each other improve their cooking skills. Chefs of different skill levels can post recipes, comment on whether they enjoyed trying someone else's recipe using ‘tasty’ and ‘not-tasty’ rates, and ask and provide advice on a shared public chat.

Target Audience

Our primary target audience was people that love cooking. Whether they want to get better, share/find new recipes or just want to find some tricks of the trade to improve their cooking, ChefSpace was for lovers of food. As this app is very simple and no user discretion is advised, the target age was anybody 13+ (or younger, if they know how to cook!)

Research

During our research phase, we dove into investigating potential competitors and pre-existing cooking apps. Throughout this process, we discovered that although they have many features, the interface of most cooking apps are disorganized and cluttered. To stand out, we decided on a minimalistic design approach where the only necessary functions and features were available to the user. We also found that visuals are extremely important to the user, so we decided that for each post a user makes, it is mandatory to post a photo along with it.

What set us apart from other cooking apps is our clean interface and features; a skill level selection once you sign up, and a public tasty/not tasty recipe rating.

User Testing

Once we had our medium-fidelity prototype ready for testing in Figma, we sent out the link along with a Google Form questionnaire to guide users through the prototype and gather information from their answers. After our first testing, we conducted a second testing to fine-tune the prototype and smooth out any potential pain points that may have been missed.

Major Findings

In our first iteration, we used different icons for each skill level rather than chef hats (utensils: beginner, plate: intermediate, chef hat: advanced). The users reported finding this confusing. As a solution, we decided to use the number of chef hats to correspond to skill level (1 hat: beginner, 2 hats: intermediate, 3 hates: advanced).

Users also reported not being able to tell when they had selected their skill level during the Sign Up process. As a solution, we added the micro-interaction of lowering the opacity of the non-selected skill levels once they have clicked on their skill level to make it stand out.

Design Justifications

Language

We used the words tasty and not tasty for evaluating recipes that users post. This chosen language follows the same principle of liking and disliking a comment, but applying it to a recipe and connecting it with food instead. Rather than simply liking/disliking, altering the verbiage aligns much more with the applications voice and tone.

Colour Palette

When deciding on the colour palette, we decided to use a burnt orange. Yellow and red are both primal food colors, which are said to stimulate appetite, so we chose a mixture of the two.

Skill States

Our team chose beginner, intermediate and professional as the skill levels that chefs can choose for themselves when signing up. This skill level is displayed next to their username on the forum and is public to all users. This feature also gives users who may have a lower skill level, the motivation to cook more and change their status to the next level up.