UX Research Study Of Garniche — A Recipe App
Overview
Garniche is a recipe app which allows users to share their experience, add new recipe and browse recipes by a group of chefs or by the community (Garnichers)
How did I think of Garniche?
Back in December before we were hit by Covid, I was living alone and something I really struggled with at that point was cooking for myself. I was trying to follow a particular diet and it was very difficult for me to find recipes easily. I downloaded few apps from the play store but I felt those apps were not engaging enough. I did get the recipes from the app but it didn’t motivate me to follow my diet. I personally have a thing where I can follow a diet or a workout routine if I have someone to share it with and that’s how I came up with Garniche.
Coming up with the name and the logo
I didn’t spend a lot of time coming up with a name for the app since it is a concept app but at the same time I naturally wanted it to represent food. I thought of all the sophisticated terms related to food (I literally had to google “sophisticated terms related to food”). I got to learn a lot of new words but that was the only good thing to come out of the google search and then suddenly “garnish” hit me and I googled (yes! i google a lot, don’t we all?) “niche” and found “denoting or relating to products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population” as the meaning of adjective “niche” and hence “GARNICHE”. I know there could have been a better explanation to this but this is really what happened and sometimes it is this easy!
When I started with the logo designing I was sure I wanted something very simple and I literally just played with the letters, that’s all!
I used a monochrome green hue of the color Zuccini(Yes it is an actual color, look it up!). The reason why I am not getting in to the details of logo designing is because I am not a professional logo designer, I am a UI/UX designer but if I want to design something from scratch then I need a logo to decide the color and aesthetics of the app and hence this!
Research Goal
I started my research with Competitive Analysis. This was probably the easiest step because GOOGLE! I just had to google “recipe apps on play store” and I had a list of all the apps that are available. I downloaded them and studied those apps. There were apps that needed serious redesigning in terms of UX and there were some really good apps too but I didn’t find anything where you could share photos or experiences and create this community of people sharing similar interests. I am not going to name any of the apps here because this is a concept based app and I am not sure if it is appropriate to do so. Now that I know what is going to be my key feature, I just wanted to make sure if this is what everybody wants.
So my research goal was to find out the needs and requirements of the users and also a way to keep it approachable, direct and delightfully surprising. So I conducted user interviews! This was done by google forms and also by personal interviews. I had 56 responses which included a lot of bloggers who were my friends and the rest were a mix of people who lived by themselves and people who just generally loved cooking.
You will find the interview questionnaire here . These were the basic questions and the rest depended upon the responses.
I also created a potential user persona just to have an idea of the demographics based on the competitive analysis. This is purely based on assumptions from the research and it helped me in setting my priorities as it came to the UI part.
Design Thinking Process
The first process of design thinking is Empathize but the order is not something that you have to follow religiously. You can always be at the last step and still come back to the first step.
Empathize
User Persona
Riya Malhotra is a 22 year old food blogger and a college student living alone in Mumbai. Her POV statement is
“Riya trying to juggle her college and a career as a food blogger needs to figure out a way to cook her daily meals and also a community to share similar interests in food with because as a food blogger she wants to have new experiences”
I have made a storyboard to show how exactly her day is like. Since she is a student and a blogger who lives alone, this is how it goes by.
Define
Affinity Maps — Based on responses
These are the responses from the interaction with the interviewees. The affinity map shows the common responses for the questions asked accordingly. I, then decided what my priorities among these would be based on how certain features were stressed upon during the interaction.
User Interview Insights
The following is the insight I got from the responses to the questionnaire and just general interaction. It consists of points that are mentioned above in the maps and also few points that are solely based on the interaction with the users.
- A platform to share their cooking experiences and explorations with a community who has similar interests.
- Create and host events for people to attend where they can meet each other.
- Add their own recipes for the world to know of their experiments.
- They choose recipes based on their cooking skills, allergy, diet, prep time etc.
- Calories of every meal according to the servings is also something that people asked for.
- An option to set the number of servings for a certain recipe so that the ingredients shown will have measurements accordingly.
- They need an option to save their recipe so that they can refer to it anytime they want to.
- Nobody is interested to pay for an app that shares recipes because they can find these recipes easily in the internet.
Checkout my blog where the UI part of the case study discussed here. Here’s a sneak peek :)
Learning and Insights
I think I could have made the app more rewarding for the users. For example by giving points for reviews or for adding recipes and these points after reaching a certain threshold will turn into a medal or a position say “beginner” or “expert” according to the total points. This will keep the users motivated to try new recipes and also increase the engagement.
Summary
UX Research is the most crucial part of any design. Empathize and Define falls in the UX Research part whereas ideate, prototype and validate falls in the UI part of it. Like I said before you don’t have to follow the order religiously but it is always good to follow this order and then go back and forth according to your needs.
I fall into the category of the target audience here but this case study showed me how things could be different for different people but yet so similar. UX Research is something that I am very passionate about and I thoroughly enjoyed researching on this app since it has to do with food and how my interviewee’s eyes lit up while talking about their food experiences :)
Thank you so much for taking your time out to read my blog. If you like what I have done here please comment, follow or maybe clap :P I would really like that! Part 2 is here
