Users are faced with a variety of food apps that have one or two really good features but are lacking when it comes to others. This causes users to have to download multiple apps and, consequently a broken user flow.
SoundsGood is the food app that can do it all for the user. It provides a seamless experience from the ideation stage of deciding what to eat to the meal on their table.
I’ll conduct an intensive competitive analysis to determine industry standards, market positioning, and task flow, which will help me reach my research goals.
I’ll rely a great deal on secondary research as recipe management apps as there are a lot of case studies and research out there on the very topic, which will hopefully give me more qualitative data from various interviews.
I’ll send out a survey where I hope to get 25-50 responses to gain a deeper understanding of my research goals, objectives, and questions.
From a thorough competitive analysis, I found four areas of focus among the 12 competitors: meal planning, social, educational, and cooking. To make it easier to digest and analyze so much competitor information, I decided to create a spider chart and competitive matrix. This helped me visually see weaknesses in the cooking app industry.
As you can tell, most of the apps have one or two areas where they really focus their app feature and user experience on; however, not one that does all fairly well.
Users want to be able to meal prep and cook what sounds good (pun intended) and clean up all within their desired timeframe
I took the data from my secondary research and competitive analysis, determined common wants and needs, and tested those in the survey. From those two research methods I put together the persona: Time-Saving Timothy
In order to map out the structure of the app, I created an app map to better help me understand the pages and content I needed to be incorporate. This is when I realized there were a lot of different aspects to this app which may decrease app learnability.
To increase learnability ease for the user, I wanted to use UI patterns from other competitors and similar apps as inspiration to create an app that makes it easy for users to learn how to use it.
I took the patterns and sketched some low-fidelity wireframes. After creating multiple ideations of each page, I decided on which to develop into mid-fidelity wireframes.
There’s nothing like getting inspiration to help develop the brand. I took words that the client has said to me about SoundsGood over the course of our communication and overall themes from participants I found during the understanding stage:
From there, I pulled imagery, UI, art, fonts, products, etc. to gather inspiration for each word.
Logo
Although simple, this logo really captures the joy cooking can bring with the smile underneath. I really wanted to emphasize the GOOD I was running into trouble with making the SOUNDS stand out as it felt like more of an audio brand of sorts.
Color palette
I really wanted to showcase the enjoyment that users get from cooking, which was found during the empathize stage of the design thinking process. It’s very warm, friendly, and inviting. This color scheme is closer to a complimentary style with the yellow-orange and blue colors.
Typeface
Due to the fun nature of the brand and color palette, I wanted a font that was friendly but also extremely harmonious to ensure there was a consistent feel across the app.
Iconography
I love creating icons, and this icon set was no exception. Although my normal style is to create an outline for a minimalistic look, I didn’t feel as if it aligned with the branding as well. I decided to create filled icons and added a little dimension and color with an inner shadow.
SoundsGood comes to life
SoundsGood really started to come together during the high-fidelity wireframes stage. Although creating the high-fidelity wireframes was fairly easy and repetitive, I started to notice areas I’d want to test.
Let’s get to testing
Building the prototype
With my high-fidelity wireframes, I created an interactive prototype in Figma to show and test how the user experience might feel.
Testing the prototype
A few bumps in the road
While analyzing my usability test data, I got a lot of feedback from the participants about needing to get over the learnability curve of the app and not clearly understanding what some of the features were used for – especially the prep feature. From this feedback, I realized I missed some research opportunities that could have improved the overall flow, learnability, and – therefore – user experience.
Doesn’t mean I can’t go back and research more! Here are some of the main ways I’m going to do just that:
Making some short-term adjustments
Although my case study has come to a close, I’ll be working with SoundsGood to bring this product to life. On my end, here’s what the next steps will look like:
While you’re here, feel free to look at some of the other cool projects I’ve been a part of!
