Commís is a cooking app that grows with you. Creating a fun learning experience for beginners.

As a class project my team designed a cooking/recipe application aimed at beginners. In the effort to make the experience of learning fun and positive, we differentiated the experience of our application through gamification and personalization. Our group had been assigned 'food' as a general topic for our project.

Overview

Type
Case Study
Year
2018
Role
Research
UI Design
UX Design
Team
Sophia Xu
Shreeya Rajgarhia
Yolanda Wu

01. Research + Empathize

Since the cooking/recipe market is huge and saturated, especially when considering platforms like youtube, a key phase in this design exercise was conducting market research for competitive and comparative analysis. We wanted to find what was clearly working well in the market but find out where users were being under-served. Through our research, we tried to find where opportunity was in giving our project a unique position.

Interviews + Surveys

Knowing now that the most influential group for a potential user base would be millennials, we conducted some interviews and surveys that would provide us with more insight on the needs of this specific demographic.

User Personas

With the 'millennial' data as our focus, we identified a few core groups of users for our app and built user personas around them. Identifying their needs, movitators and creating a use narrative made it easier for us to imagine their experience.

02. Exploration

Now that we had created a framework for the application's identity, we began design exploration and iteration. This was an end to end development exercise so everything from on-boarding to user retention had to be considered.

User Journey + User Flow

Using sticky notes, we roughly laid out a user journey. Trying to understand what the thought process and struggles might be along the way. Using this, we scoped out what the essential features of our app would be and created a user flow map.

Wireframing

Once we had a set of features and user flow in mind, we began to draft out what our interface would look like through wireframing. We tried to get a variety of different layouts with both vertical and horizontal orientations. Using a select variation of these wireframes, we conducted user-testing for further insight on which flows and layouts were most intuitive and engaging.

03. Final Design

Using the designs from our wireframes we developed our final UI. Selecting a bright yellow as our main color and adding bold graphic elements, we kept a fun and light look throughout the app. The project was named 'Commis', a title given to a beginner chef undergoing training, to reflect the goal of our app.