Cooking Habits: A UX Research Project
This blog covers a research project completed during my Memorisely UX Research bootcamp. The goal was to identify opportunities for improvement in recipe discovery and organization for casual cooks who use the Kitchen Stories app. I completed the project collaboratively with a partner, and we divided all tasks evenly, so we could each get opportunities to learn from the assignment.
Prefer a visual medium? Check out the FigJam for this project. It contains all the same information in this blog post. Happy reading!
Background and Goals
Our goal was to make recommendations for the Kitchen Stories on improvements in their recipe organization features. In order to inform these recommendations, we focused on understanding how casual cooks organize recipes in their day-to-day life. Our research uncovered recipe discovery and storage patterns from a variety of digital and non-digital sources.
All results are organized in a FigJam file, which you can view here.
Insights and Recommendations
- Subscription-based recipe services are popular.
- Many casual cooks enjoy subscription-based recipe sources like NYTimes or Blue Apron, and verbalize that those sources have recipes that are “interesting” and meet their culinary standards.
- By not incorporating recipes from sources preferred by casual cooks, the Kitchen Stories app is missing an opportunity to capture a market that enjoys interesting and novel flavors and ingredients.
Recommendation: Kitchen Stories should explore technical solutions for bringing subscription-only recipes into Kitchen Stories app for users to discover. - Cooks have many sources for recipes.
- Cooks enjoy curating a broad source of recipe inspiration: blogs, cookbooks, social media, etc. Few cooks — less than 20% — rely on a single source for all of their recipes.
- Because of the variety of sources, few cooks have consolidated recipes into a single organization system, and instead keep a mental log of where to go to find a given recipe or author.
Recommendation: Use document import or photo upload to allow users to import non-digital recipes. Technology such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) could be used to parse uploads into recipes. - Cooks group recipes by overlapping conceptual buckets.
- Ingredient, Season or Holiday, and Dish/Meal Type are main conceptual buckets casual cooks intuitively choose to organize their thinking about recipes. These often overlap: e.g. a seasonal ingredient that was interesting at the farmer’s market.
- Casual cooks want organizational tools to reflect the categories and buckets that they naturally use to think about recipes.
Recommendation: Explore workflows where users can save or categorize recipes in multiple, intersectional ways. This could include multi-add functionality to a set of folders, or adding tags with logic filtering [yes/and, either/or]. - Familiarity is an important part of casual cooks’ routines.
- Casual cooks enjoy returning to mainstay dishes or types of dish. They like to know where these are stored and how to access them easily, but may not access them every time they want to cook that dish/type. Folks tend to strike a balance in their daily lives between a sense of familiarity or improvisation on a known theme, and a sense of discovery.
- Casual cooks desire having often-used recipes in an easy-to-access location for quick reference. Often, these cooks do not need the full recipe text. Instead, they may reference the recipe for small details — cook time, ingredient list, etc.
Recommendation: Explore in-app capabilities to detect and surface often-used recipes, such as marking recipes as “favorite” or marking time/date recipe was cooked.
Methods and Activities
Competitor Benchmarking
We began our research by evaluating 2 competitor products using a 6-point framework:
- strengths
- weaknesses
- content
- design
- UX
- opportunities
We chose to evaluate a direct competitor (NYTimes Cooking) and indirect competitor (Pinterest) to Kitchen Stories. For each, we chose a similar workflow: searching for a recipe for spaghetti and meatballs, and saving that recipe for later.
Since our research goal was focused on how users save and organize recipes, we took special interest in the capabilities and experience of each app during save.
Pinterest offers users the most flexibility for organizing and categorizing recipes: when saving a recipe to a “board”, users have options to name the board, share with others, and mark privacy.
Kitchen Stories offers a similar capability with their “cookbooks”, though they do not have any collaboration features.
NYTimes has the most simplistic experience for saving a recipe of the three apps, but offers users the least visibility into where the recipe is being saved, relying on users to have an existing mental model of their recipe organization. This flow relies on user recall, not visual recognition of the folder structure, which is an opportunity for improvement.
Survey
Next, we sent out a survey to collect qualitative and some cohort-based insights about how casual cooks select and organize their recipes. We designed the survey to contain multiple types of questions to provide insights from many angles. The survey began with closed-ended questions for cohorting and segmentation, and moving into open-ended questions for attitudinal insights, using branched logic to sort questions based on users’ cooking habits and preferred recipe apps. We received 45 respondents to the survey.
User Interviews
We wanted to gain more attitudinal insights than the survey yielded, so we decided to complete 3 user interviews. To identify candidates for interviews, we created a screener survey to identify our target research audience [see “Participants” section of Research Plan]. After sending the survey within our network, we identified three interviewees for 60-minute interviews.
Interview Analysis
Following the interviews, we created a taxonomy of insights in the categories of Demographics, Recipe Discovery, Recipe Organization, and Cooking Behaviors. Using Dovetail, we tagged interview insights with taxonomy categories, allowing ourselves easy lookup of the source material for a particular insight.
Following the creating of the taxonomy and tagging the interview content, we created an affinity map to group insights. This surfaced three areas of pain for users with respect to recipe organization: difficulties which prevent organization, parameters that cooks use to organize recipes, and tools that cooks use to organize recipes.
Usability Testing
Our final research effort was an unmoderated usability test of the Kitchen Stories app via Maze, which contained 4 segmentation questions and 2 user tasks. Our initial goal was to gather quantitative insights from the usability test, but due to the respondent count of 8, we chose not to run statistical analysis and instead examine the qualitative results. While completing the tasks, users left comments. These comments were the genesis of the recommendations and solutions from the final insights report.
Reflections
This project was a great opportunity to practice research methods I had previously not done, and to improve on methodology I had done before. My favorite method was an unmoderated study — I enjoyed reviewing the comments that users left for us and seeing the ways in which they struggled with the workflow.
This research project was completed over 5 weeks in a bootcamp environment. The research tasks were assigned in a linear fashion, which did not leave much flexibility for iteration. For example, we would have liked to conduct some interviews, created a taxonomy based on those interviews, and applied that taxonomy to future research. In future projects, I plan to design iteration into the research process to allow for more granularity and certainty in insights.
Lastly, I would like to acknowledge my project partner Tara Shepersky — Tara was a fantastic collaborator. We divided our tasks as evenly as we could, so that we both could get practical experience with each method. Tara has extensive experience building taxonomies and I learned a lot from her mothodolgy.
