Food Recipe

Brief description & objective: As part of the MSc Innovation and Entrepreneurship course in the University of Bristol, my team and I were tasked with a design challenge - innovate a solution for a fictional food company to help them adapt to the new norms brought by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Project duration: 3 months

My responsibilities: I took a leading role in managing the project and organizing the group meetings. I was also responsible for conducting secondary research and interviewing target users as well as data analysis, facilitate brainstorm session, sketch ideas and storyboarding prototyping

Approach and process: Our team followed the innovation process below to design the solution.

1) Explore and Synthesise: Exploring the problem

We began the explored phase by diverging- we conducted secondary research to understand the major shifts in people's eating behaviours since the Covid-19 pandemic. We then carry out further secondary research and interviews.

Next, we synthesised three key insights:

Insight 1: People want to eat healthy but still continue eating unhealthy products.

Insight 2: Technology has shifted the focus from dining out to online food delivery.

Insight 3: Cooking at home became a newfound interest.

We also identified our ideal target audience as young people aged 20 to 30 years old living in the UK. Thus, we asked three How Might We questions:

How might we make healthy food more convenient and accessible for young people aged from 20 to 30 in the UK?

How might we use technology to improve the efficiency of food service for young people aged from 20 to 30 in the UK?

How might we increase the convenience and fun of cooking at home?

2) Ideate & Prototype and Deliver: Designing the solution

To ideate, we brainstormed ideas by using methods such as Challenging Questions, 6-3-5 Brainwriting and Fishbowl method.

Challenging Questions

6-3-5 Brainwriting

Fishbowl

Ideas were evaluated through the Idea Portfolio method to assess their feasibility and impact on the customers.

Then, we then sketched each idea. My idea (highlighted by the rectangle below) was to link the track record of the users' physical condition information in an app to food recommendations. Thus, the app could suggest suitable food for the users such as high protein or low calories.

As we discussed and shared our ideas, I found that my idea could be combined with others’. Thus, we combined these ideas into our final solution - the Food Recipe app, which includes two functions:

1) Deliver healthy meal deals according to users' goals:

User choose healthy meal deals according to their goals such as high protein or low calories. Then, the app will display the options in nearby supermarkets, sorted by the distance from the users. So, the users could choose their preferred meals to be delivered.
It is convenient and affordable for young people to get healthy food.
Food recommendation functions reduces efforts in food selection.

2) An online community to share recipes:

It is an open platform for users to share food knowledge and learn how to cook various recipes by themselves.
It is a community specifically for food and cooking. Thus, users save time from filtering cooking tips and food knowledge in other community platform with all sorts of information.

These two functions are not separate. The online community helps the app to attract and accumulate more users, which open up possibilities for them to order deliveries. On the other hand, when the regular delivery users want to cook food, they could turn to the online community for more tips, which is beneficial to build a stronger and long-term customer relationship by keeping on the app.

Finally, we prototyped the solution by drawing a storyboard and delivered our solution in a presentation to the "client" (our lecturer).

My responsibilities: Storyboarding prototyping (shown below).

The results: The "client" was very satisfied with the solution commended us for a good job done.

What I learned:

I am constantly looking for ways to improve my work. Firstly, though the two functions of the app could complement each other, we should have narrowed down the focus and decided which function to start with. For example, we could design the food delivery function as the minimum viable product (MVP) and get feedback from the potential users. Additionally, due to time constraints and project scope, we were unable to test the solutions with users. Testing with users is a crucial step in designing solutions as it helps us to understand their needs and how we could meet them better, resulting in a user-centred solution.

Thus, I have since prioritised focusing on developing an MVP (instead of an elaborate product) and conducting multiple rounds of testing with users to ensure I am able to deliver a solution that creates value for its users.