UX/UI RESEARCH & DESIGN
Advancing adolescents' cooking and sustainability skills
TEAM
ROLE
UX Researcher & Designer
duration
3 months
Context
The semester-long project for an "Interaction Design" course had just one requirement: it must address at least one Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) developed by the United Nations. As a team, we brainstormed various systems we could build, but nothing immediately sparked out interest... until one did. Between our team members, we love cooking and gaming, so we decided to build out from out interests; thus, we landed on building an app interface for adolescents to learn cooking and sustainability in a gamified experience. This idea supports the SDG of ensuring good health and overall well-being of people no matter their age.
How might we…
encourage and teach adolescents to develop healthy kitchen habits?
Preliminary Research
As a group, we interviewed eight potential users, including adolescents, teenagers, and parents of young children. The goal of these interviews was to understand how they currently approach cooking and sustainability. From these interviews, several themes appeared...
Adolescents lacked knowledge in cooking and sustainability and relied on parents to provide nutritious meals
Teenagers had some kitchen experience, but only from helping their parents or making very basic meals
Parents had similar responses as to why their kids don’t cook often: they don’t have the time and effort to teach them
Personas & Storyboards
young adolescent
parent
Initial Designs & Feedback
We started our design process by focusing on the key elements of our app: the homepage, the tutorial, the mini game, and the quiz. With these sections established, we divided the work and created basic visuals.
Key Revisions
We conducted short usability tests throughout the design process, and we used the feedback to make appropriate changes.
Expanded prototype functionality to allow for incorrect answers and display appropriate feedback
Added introduction pages for the mini game and quiz to provide more context and create smooth transitions
Adjusted the colors of the exit modal buttons to comply with standards
Final Designs
Reflection
I'd never worked on creating an app meant for adolescents, so being able to bring EcoChef to life with my team was so fun! I enjoyed learning more about creating gamified experiences, as well as designing interfaces that would visually and functionally work for kids. Besides the rewarding design process, I also gained further experience in various UX research methods—user interviews and usability tests—that helped refine our project throughout the semester. As someone who only learned how to cook in high school, and is still picking up sustainability skills, I think it's really important that kids become comfortable in the kitchen from an early age. While EcoChef is not a live system, I hope that a team can bring a similar idea to fruition one day.