A Taste of Home to Your Kitchen
Creating a Friendly and Appetizing User Experience for Asian Kitchen, a Meal Kit Delivery Service
A Mother’s Cooking Feels like Home
Asian Kitchen is a meal kit delivery service that brings the customer’s mother’s cooking to their home. The recipes are created from research of various Asian mothers’ recipes throughout the whole country. Targeted to busy Asian food lovers, every Care Box can have preselected weekly choices based on their preferences of quantity and cuisines, or customized from a variety of weekly recipes based on what they are craving for. It minimizes weekly meal planning efforts and saves on a trip to the grocery only to find the ingredients are not available. It is all about delivering the freshest and most authentic ingredients to the customer’s doorstep on the day most convenient for them. In the end, customers enjoy their meals just the way their mother makes it, their bellies, and their hearts full.
The Conception of Asian Kitchen
Since this is a newly established service, it is aimed at entering the market and growing its customer base. In order to get customers, the service would need an online ordering system from which customers are able to transact with the business effectively. Therefore, the design of the Asian Kitchen website is a course project focused on the creation of a user interface that streamlines the service’s online ordering process and provides a friendly and appetizing user experience to gain customers and build loyalty. I am the sole UX researcher and designer of the project.
Client:
Asian Kitchen
Project Duration:
4 weeks
Roles:
UX/UI Lead
Team:
Cherry Bernardo
To start the design process, I identified the business and user goals to ensure that the end product provides value to all its stakeholders. With this, the business aims to:
- To provide customers a convenient way of cooking Asian meals
- To build a loyal customer base of subscribers to the weekly service
- To facilitate the ordering and subscription of the service for the users
For the users, the goals are:
- To have meal ideas for meal planning
- To not have to think about what to cook
- To have the ingredients ready and not have to look for them in the grocery
- To ensure that the ingredients are complete and accurate to create authentic Asian meals
The Meal Kit Delivery Service Framework
Based on secondary research and user flows from the competitive scan, I then created personas, scenarios, and use cases. These helped in understanding the target audience to plan out an effective information architecture, UI navigation and overall content.
Based on secondary research and user flows from the competitive scan, I then created personas, scenarios, and use cases. These helped in understanding the target audience to plan out an effective information architecture, UI navigation and overall content.
Transforming the Framework to a Visual and Interactive Design
From the domain research, I proceeded to the development of the design starting off with establishing the information architecture and site map of the website in GlooMaps. This will help in ensuring that the navigation is clear, and in identifying the different levels of pages that needed to be created.
From the IA and site map, I drew up the wireframes in AdobeXD of the different pages in the website to establish the connection between the IA and the visual implementation of the user interface. This ensures that the pages contain the necessary content and are all complete following the page hierarchy. I then conceptualized the branding by creating a logo that captures the essence of the service and selecting colours that are considered appetizing and representative of Asian food. All of these to ensure that the user interface provides a space where users are aware that it is a service related to Asian cooking and food.
With the finalized wireframes and branding, I developed the wireframes into a high-fidelity prototype in AdobeXD to include interactivity between pages making it close to the actual end-product that can be used for user testing. The final pages included in the prototype are as follows:
- Homepage – Communicates the why and the how to convince customers that it is the service for them
- On the Menu page – Customers can choose among a variety of recipes for their weekly cravings
- Recipe Page – Shows that dishes are easy and simple to prepare and cook.
- Preferences page – Customers can set their cuisine preferences for curated weekly recipes and choose when they want their Care Box to be delivered
I ended the course project with an interactive prototype and I recommend the following next steps to ensure that the prototype meets the needs of both the business and user. The first next step is usability testing where I will create a user testing plan and script based on the scenarios identified in the research. I will then recruit participants who are part of the target audience as identified by the personas, having a total of six with three participants representative of each persona. Once the schedules are set, I will conduct a moderated and in-person user testing and gather observations and measure metrics mainly on the effectiveness of the user interface The findings of which I will apply on the following step of design iterations. I will make the changes on the prototype to reflect the results and insights from the user testing. If needed, I will conduct another round of user testing to check if the changes made are effective and appropriate for the user.
Mother’s Cooking Made Simple
My key takeaway from the whole project is that food is an essential part of life and preparing it is a source of joy for many. It is important that with a service such as Asian Kitchen, the customer is provided with an experience that makes meal planning simple and easy with an online ordering tool that not only facilitates transactions effectively but is a friendly and appetizing tool to be used. The process should also ensure that the freshest and most authentic ingredients are delivered to customers when they need it. All of these aspects will, in the end, help them focus on the joy of cooking and eating their food leaving them with a satisfying and pleasant Asian Kitchen experience.
CERISE CREATIVES 