Students who Cook

Client
School Project
Service
Research Project
Year
Year 2, semester 2
Students who Cook
Millions of young adults and students globally have limited appliances, food, and time. With these restrictions it is extremely hard to make well balanced meals. By conducting a series of research methods with students we can understand them more thoroughly and have a stronger understanding of what exactly they need in an app to help them make delicious meals with simply what they have.

Business Solution

Research Questions
• What are students biggest struggle when it comes to cooking ? • Do most students know how to cook ? • What type of “go to” meals are students already having ?
Our Hypothesis
• Students aren't aware of how to cook a variety of meals • Students struggle with high food costs • Students have a tough time being healthy
Reflection
What I would do differently for this project now is • Asked deeper questions so I could get stronger data •Create low and high fidelity wireframes •Spread my survey to a larger number of people as well as people from different backgrounds
Methods
Method 1 : Focus group •Gain an understatement of our target audience and simple frustrations while cooking. ‍Method 2: Survey •Understand users on a larger scale to then group and categorize their frustrations and begin understanding their journey.   Method 3: Diary study  •Receive a complete understanding of users journey in detail and specific events that may occur during that journey.
Ethics and Privacy
All our data will be recorded and safely stored in a secure file accessible only by myself. At the end of our study our data will be sorted into one final deliverable. All raw data will be kept on a computer and terminated once data is analyzed.
Executive summary
Key Themes  •Students have between 11min - an hour to cook meals •They don't cook all there meals (between 1-7 a week)   •Their biggest challenges are Lack of time, knowledge and ingredients. •Lastly they get majority of their meal ideas from websites and apps  ‍ Why does this matter ?‍ Allows us to understand key details about our audience Determine frustrations Determine overall process

Method 1: Focus groups

Reasoning for this study
The facilitators will be organizing a focus group in order to recognize the users wants and needs. Participants will be asked to share their experiences and opinions to thoroughly understand the problems they may have faced.
Tasks
Identify and understand their problems: The facilitator needs to figure out and understand the problems that users face throughout their cooking journey.
Understand their expectations: In order to help the audience, their expectations need to be understood so we can create a plan to deliver a flawless experience throughout the journey.

Risks and Assumptions

Risk: People may not show up Mitigation: We will recruit extra people
Risk: Participants may be very quiet Mitigation: We will have a warm up game to get them comfortable and probing questions to get them talking.
Risk: Technical difficulties Mitigation: We will test all software prior to the focus group.
Assumptions
• Meeting will be done in person
• If there is bad weather we as a whole will decide to reschedule. • All notes will be collected and sorted into a presentation within a week

Key findings

• Students often cook things they are familiar with from their culture • Students often learn how to cook from videos online • Students often cook what they have in the fridge rather then what they want to cook (dont go out to buy more ingredients)

Method 2: survey

Surveys are great for collecting simple open and closed ended data. It is also great to do for a large target audience since they don't need a facilitator or have to set up a time to do it. They are also inexpensive because of these reasons. Lastly a survey will allow participants to submit 100% anonymous data as you often don't have to submit any data such as your name.

Risks and Assumptions

Risk: Some participants might not be our target and not eligible Mitigation: We will integrate screener questions in our survey
Risk: May have unpredicted results that doesn't go along with our studyMitigation: We will pivet our project towards a different direction
Assumptions • Similar results as our focus group
• We will have clear data that can be well represented in a variety of charts and stats to back up our study
• Assume our survey will reach a variety of people (race, gender, income etc) rather then just one group of people.

Survey Results

Key findings

Key Themes •Students have between 11 min - an hour to cook meals •They don't cook all there meals (between 1-7 a week) •Their biggest challenges are Lack of time, knowledge and ingredients.•Lastly they get majority of their meal ideas from websites and apps Why does this matter ?• Allows us to understand key details about our audience • Determine frustrations • Determine overall process

Method 3: Diary study

A Diary study will be completed because its is very cost effective and can even be completed remotely (or in their most comfortable environment). It allows users to record data as it happens making it very detailed and descriptive as well as it creates chances for sampling since its done over a longer period of time.

Risks and Assumptions

Risk: Participants may not stay on track.Mitigation: We will do reminders and check ins to make sure participants keep on track with their data.
Risk: Adapting to changes Mitigation: As soon as results begin to come in we will start analyzing the data.
Assumptions • Participants will record all data in detail.
• Participants will keep us updated with any questions or concerns they may have
• Assume our diary study will be spread out between many demographics (race, gender, income etc)

user Journey map

This is a users journey map based on the overall data recieved from my diary study particpants. These consisent of key "themes" found within the days of this study. From this data we can reinforce what we already know from the previous two methods and draw out some overall themes.

Overall Findings


•Overall participants cooked from memory rather then following a recipe.
•Participants biggest frustrations were missing ingredients and running out of time
•On average participants spent about 25 min cooking each meal •Participants did not have a good solution for these mistakes which we can help with by fixing the problem or eliminating it before it even occurs with a specialized cooking app

App Sketches

Moving Forward

Our next steps will include • Low fidelity Wireframes
•High fidelity Wireframes
•Prototypes
•Usability testing