Owambe

Helping users learn and share recipes real time

Type: IOS Mobile App

Duration: 7 weeks

Role: Solo Product Designer

Tools: Figma, Miro, Invision

Context

Cooking with loved ones across distances

Imagine a group of friends and family who are separated by distance, but still want to share their love for cooking with one another. They want to collaborate on cooking projects and learn new recipes together, but they can't physically be in the same kitchen.

Problem

There is no real-time recipe sharing platform

Currently, there are different methods for users to share and learn recipes but there is none that allows them to do it in real-time. How can we design a cooking app for friends and family who are living separately for them to be able to share and follow along with recipes while cooking together across their different households?

Solution

Real-time collaboration and community-sharing

Owambe is a platform for friends and families to cook together in real time with their loved ones, or share recipes for later use if they can't find a mutually convenient time. Also, for those without a specific cooking partner, Owambe's community feature allows users to discover and learn trending recipes from various regions.

Introduction

Users can see recipes trending in different parts of the world or search for recipes to learn. Users are also directly presented with the Create Recipe and Learn Recipe button options. Users are shown an informational overlay on how the app works.

Adding ingredients and cooking invite

Recipe sharer adds all the necessary ingredients and food information, decides to share in real-time, and sends a cooking invite.

Cooking Real Time

After the user clicks on start cooking, the user says each step one by one before carrying it out and the sound is automatically transcribed by the app and sent to the learner in real-time. Both parties can decide to chat or add other people to learn. Users also get rewarded points for time spent cooking.

From Discovery to Design: My Process

Discovering the problem

First of all, what is a recipe?

According to the Oxford Dictionary, a recipe is a set of instructions for preparing a particular dish, including a list of the ingredients required.

Why do people share food?

I conducted Market research to get an understanding of the problem. One of the platforms I searched was Twitter.

Screenshots from Twitter

The main insight from the screenshots above is that:

I wanted to get further insights so I decided to conduct user interviews to find out:

What other reasons do people have to share or learn recipes?
What are the problems with the current means of sharing and learning recipes?

Quotes from interview

What problems exists with current means of learning/sharing recipe?

My interviewees have only used two mediums to learn or share recipes, Phone calls and Social media/YouTube. These were their pain points:

Phone Call

Hated sharing through the phone because they had to repeat themselves.
There's no way to save the recipe. So they both would have to do it a second time.
They found it discomforting to be on the phone throughout the cooking.

Social Media/Youtube

Sometimes it is too fast.
The types of ingredients are usually not clear.
They have assumptions about what you are supposed to know already.
Sometimes, they do not include the time each cooking step takes.

Defining the Problem

"How might we help people learn and share recipes with accurate ingredient information while preventing repetition and making them feel rewarded?"

User Persona

There are two personas

Two main personas would benefit from a "cooking-Real-Time-App". The person sharing the recipe and the person learning it. To best understand how an app would help them, I empathized to find out their goals and wants.

Recipe Sharer

Recipe Learner

User Journey

I started ideating a user's journey through the app.

Ideation

Mid-Fidelity Wireframes

I created sketches from my ideation and converted them to mid-fidelity wireframes to visualize how they would be featured on the app

High-Fidelity Wireframes

I converted the mid-fi wireframe to Hi-Fi so it would be easier for me to test the functionality after prototyping.

After prototyping and testing this with potential users, I discovered users had problems understanding the cooking screens, so I brainstormed further and came up with the following modifications.

Interaction difference between new and previous design

Opportunities for improvement

A video feature could make people learn better but none of my interviewees have shared a recipe using any video channel, so I wasn't able to empathize to implement the feature. The next line of action would be to interview more people.
The app solely relying on voice activation, ostracizes people with speech difficulties. What other feature can I implement to combat wet hands?
What less confusing names could I have used instead of "share recipe" and "share recipe real-time"?
I did not account for the noise. Users might want to occasionally talk to family members or sing while cooking. How can that sound be prevented from being recorded as part of the instructions for the cooking?

Reflection

Working on this project was really challenging for me because I came up with something new and I had to think through a lot of possible userflows and did a lot of research which I later found out wasn't enough for the scope of the project.

Thank you for reading.