<aside> 💡 Summary Dareen and David analyzed, redesigned, and tested the Plant Jammer Project by using a design thinking UX framework. The focus of the project was to improve user-engagement ingredient substitution by creating unique design concepts. Here is the final prototype.

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👧🏻👦🏻 Who

• David (Designer) and Dareen (Researcher)

❓What

UX Contest #16 - Plant Jammer Project

⏰When

March, 26, 2021 - 11:59 pm

🤷Why

To apply our understanding of UX research and UX design process through challenging ourselves with a case study.

🛠️How

Framework: Utilizing Design Thinking process to Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test

Tools: Figma, Qualtrics, Notion, UserZoom

Background

Plant Jammer is a website that allows you to create a collection of recipes. It uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide dynamic recipes for small brands, retailers, and large food & beverage brands.

One of its feature is ingredient substitution, which allow users to substitute a main ingredient with another ingredient that might be more readily available. However, early data shows lower-than-expected user-engagement for this feature.

🎯 Challenge

Rethinking the experience of substituting recipe ingredients and creating unique design concepts.

Target Users

• Small brands
• Retailers
• Large food and beverage brands

Timeline

Usability Testing [Emphatize]

<aside> 💡 Defining what the user need. Usability testing will be conducted to understand the users' thought process while utilizing this feature, and to detect any user pain points that might be the cause of low user-engagement.

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Usability Testing Plan

• Usability Testing Questions

Problem Statement

How might we improve the user interface of the Plant Jammer website so we can increase the users' experience and overall satisfaction and increase the number of user-engagement?

Objectives

• To uncover the user's pain points
• To understand the user's thought process
• To alleviate the user's pain points using user-centered design
• To improve the UI/UX of the website
• To increase user-engagement

Methodology - Usability Testing

• UserZoom (Remote, Unmoderated)
• Why: We are interested in the users' thought process while using the website, as well as the usability of the website.

Users

Small brands, retailers, and large food & beverage brands

Participant Profiles

• 5 acquaintances
  • People who have experience with using the web are chosen as participants since there is a lack of resources to contact target users for user research.

Insights

• Usability Testing Insights

Conclusion

• Positives

• User Behaviors

• Pain Points

• Feedback

Brainstorming Session [Define + Ideate]

[Define] After conducting usability testing, we've concluded the main problem for the lower-than-expected user engagement for the ingredient substitution is due to:

• Lack of contrast
• Non-existent separation
• Ambiguous directions

But the overall website itself is also lacking

• Hierarchy
• Variation
• Too much redundant information

[Ideate] To solve this issue, we came up with a few ideas after hearing the user feedback.

We use the first 3 methods to create great UX (by Jordan Lawrence)

1. Words - Establish a clear hierarchy between, header, sub-header, descriptions, etc.
2. Decluttering-ness - establishing urgency (removing redundant elements), introducing separation, and increasing white space
3. Clarity - polishing/cleaning design through introducing visual guidance and providing accessibility through element consistency (using a color palette, assigning certain shapes to certain actions, etc.)

Menu without substitution

Menu with substitution

After considering the 3 main methods, we came up with a few ideas on how to design an effective substitution that will increase user engagement. From all of the options, there are two main options that we preferred: shifting the substitute ingredients and introducing pill options for ingredients.