In the Bag
Solo Project
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Turning your chore into more! A robust app that provides recipe suggestions based on your store's weekly sale items.
Tools Used
Overview
In the Bag is my very first solo project at Kenzie Academy. It began with a simple prompt to encourage us to learn & implement the design thinking process.
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Target Demographic: Young urban professionals
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Objective: Save money by preparing lunches each week
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Challenges: There are MANY meal planning apps available. How might In the Bag differ from these?
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Role: Researcher & Designer
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countless
Survey Responses
Interviews
Usability Tests
Iterations
lessons learned
Surveys
Survey methodologies: Multiple Choice, Google forms
Who did I find?
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Network of both single and married individuals.
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Ages ranging from 27-44.
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69% identify as female.
What did I find?
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Users often overspend or simply don't keep track of spending on lunches
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Most find it important to prepare their meals vs. eating out
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Several users are willing to spend 1-3 hours per week preparing their lunches
Initial Hypothesis
My initial hypothesis was that this app was some sort of budgeting app.
After discovering some juicy quantitative data, I wanted to explore more about the latter two statistics. I found it interesting that meal prep was important to many participants, however, they didn’t have much time to commit. Let’s dive in and unpack this!!!
Interviews
Tools Used: Zoom, Whimsical
Conducting interviews was extremely insightful.
The age, race, gender, and location demographics paint a great picture of who my users might be.
Curiosity about how they felt about their cooking skills and wanting to unpack details surrounding the amount of time each could commit to preparing meals drove my interview questions.
Key Interview Questions:
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How do you currently keep track of your food expenses?
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What resources do you currently use to save money on food purchases?
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How much time are you willing to spend cooking in order to save money?
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Talk me through the process of creating your grocery list.
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Why don’t you track spending?
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Why do you eat out rather than prepare?
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What is it about the shopping experience that frustrates you?
“I wouldn’t want to spend a lot (of time). My sleep is precious!”
“The best version of me would meal prep on Sunday for the week. The current version procrastinates and tells herself she doesn’t have time to do it while she scrolls tik-tok.”
“I will choose sleep over food every time!”
Persona & Journey Map
Tools Used: Whimsical & Figma
Click images to enlarge.
After capturing fantastic insights from my interviews, I synthesized my findings into a single persona and produced a quick journey map.
Why did I do this?
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The journey map clearly defined pain points in the current process & helped me empathize.
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Having Emily by my side through the iterative process was meant to help keep me from falling victim to "scope creep".
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Referring to her quote was useful many times throughout the process as it reminded me saving time was of equal importance to saving money.
The REAL Problem
Of course my users wanted to save money. That part is a no-brainer! I found the real issues to be...
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Lack of Motivation. The tasks of searching, shopping, and prepping are tedious, time-consuming, and mundane.
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Time vs. Money. Participants want to save money, but not at the expense of their time.
How might we develop an app that helps the user save both time and money while encouraging them to plan, shop for, & prepare their meals?
User Flows
Tools Used: Whimsical
A few playbacks of interview recordings and a pile of virtual stickies later...
What did I do?
I extracted common themes from my notes and developed the top user needs. I then began iterations of potential user flows.
Initial Flow Ideas
Why did I do this?
I wanted to focus on the step by step journey of the experience. By exploring possible solutions at a high level, I was able to stay focused on the overall experience a user might have within the app. This approach saved me TIME I could have potentially wasted on creating screens that ended up being unnecessary.
Click images to enlarge.
Revised Flows
Key Learnings
I found myself designing too big, trying to incorporate every possible solution and edge case.
Feedback from facilitators encouraged me to break the flows into-
1) The onboarding/account sign up
2) The happy path app use
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Click images to enlarge.
Sketches
I began the ideating process by sketching possible solutions.
Yes, it's dark mode graph paper!!
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Utilizing the crazy 8's sketch method provided me the opportunity to explore ideas rapidly without marrying myself to one right away.
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Creating the lists of MUST & MAY haves helped me focus as I began this process.
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Sketching moved the project forward by providing space to visualize concepts before committing to any single idea.
Ultimately, I ended up using a hybrid of elements from each of the drawings. I leaned into the need for a dashboard home screen & wanted to keep elements of gamification to keep Emily interested.
Wireframes
Tools used: Whimsical
In order to test my ideas, I moved on to mid-fidelity wireframing. It was in this stage that I went through many iterations of my key screens.
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Feedback from fellow cohort mates and facilitators encouraged the iterative process.
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Many screens saw 3-8 revisions before landing on a solid happy path to test.
Using Whimsical was beneficial as it provides standard elements with several constraints. This kept me focused on functionality throughout this process.
Iterations of the Home Screen
User Testing
Tools used: Whimsical & InVision
Before moving into Hi-Fidelity prototyping, I conducted usability testing. This is experience was very insightful and rather humbling!
I conducted remote testings with 5 participants ages ranging from 28-43. Three of the five participants were contributors to the initial survey & interview process.
The test consisted of four "missions" focusing on specific tasks.
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#1- Onboarding and adding your first recipe
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#2- Filing and sorting features of the app
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#3- Flow of the experience from browsing to successfully shopping
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#4- Navigation functions and clarity of iconography
These tests confirmed some of my design choices but also informed me of some much-needed iterations, specifically surrounding the flow and clarity of how the app saves money. Another major pain point I discovered in testing was to streamline the process of saving and filing recipes for later use.
User Feedback & Solutions
Use Cases
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Users aren’t motivated to plan meals each week. The task is tedious and mundane.
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Users select the number of meals to shop for during onboarding allowing for customized goal setting.
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Gesture based interactions with real time progress and spending updates provide an efficient meal planning process while keeping the user engaged.
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Users ALWAYS want to save money, but not at the expense of their time.
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Algorithms search the store’s weekly sales ad and generates recipes based on the sale items, saving both time & money!
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The curated shopping list provides the aisle location of each item to expedite the in store experience for users.
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Users need to budget and keep track of their spending on groceries.
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Users set budget goals during onboarding.
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Real time update of how much the items in their bag will cost, encourages under-spending!
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Gamification and incentivizing of budget feature to monitor spending and help meet goals.
“I go through a lot of different apps currently to save money, so to be able to just find recipes AND it saves me money...that's huge!"
“I like that the recipes are pulling from the weekly ads...to have something that does it for me is fantastic!"
“The app provides small wins! Ir's pumping me up through the process. Like you got this!"
Hi-Fidelity & Prototype
I approached the hi-fidelity prototype with a clean and natural aesthetic. I found my influences in natural elements.
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The background texture is inspired by quartz countertops you may find in a kitchen.
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Taking cues from natural food brands such as Whole Foods, paper bags, and vegetables themselves inspired the clean, natural and approachable color palette.
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Typography & icon choices were aimed at keeping the UI clean & professional while feeling approachable.
Interact with the prototype
"We adored the amount of thought and rework you did during your user testing phase. It shows real commitment to growth and more importantly, your users."
Ryan Robinson, Director of UX Program Kenzie Academy
key takeaways
This project has been very satisfying. It revealed my ability to critically think and empathize with a diverse group of humans. At times, it felt like a very intense rollercoaster ride with feelings of uncertainty mixed with moments of small wins.
Successes: The core functionality of the app is something that users were excited about. They felt it was truly a unique & beneficial way to save time and money.
Struggles: I struggled a LOT with scope creep. Wanting to solve every problem and every edge case became overbearing and cumbersome at times. Brainstorming sessions with my facilitators helped me to refocus on the core problems the app aims to solve and group some additional features I designed as "version 2" of the app. Surprisingly, this turned into a huge win helping me to truly understand an MVP while also thinking about the future of the app for user retention and inclusion.
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