UI Designer
Visual design, branding, color palette generation, wireframe, prototyping, and usability testing.
4 weeks
Culini is a mock start-up that wanted to delve into the online groceries market. They want to develop a mobile-first experience by allowing people to buy groceries on the go.
The client tasked me with the following:
Utilized our client’s previous user interview data in understanding the millennial target audience needs and goals.
Exploring grocery e-commerce competitors.
With the market saturation, Culini needs to stand out not only to deliver groceries faster but invest in better customer service, and unique personalized experience for consumers. One example would be to integrate more affordable and easily shoppable recipes. Culini could evolve Blue Apron’s meal plan kit idea by suggesting recipes that share ingredients that allow the consumer to buy in bulk while also reducing food waste.
After analyzing the provided user interview data from Culini, I found that millennials share goals to shop for groceries according to their budgets. These millennials are living in metropolitan cities. Here are the data on the participants :
Their primary motivation is to shop and cook healthy meals whether it's for dietary restrictions or maintaining a healthier lifestyle. They all usually stick with one main grocery store due to their locations, budgets, and dietary restrictions.
These are the insights gathered from the client's user data:
Overall millennials needed a better way to shop groceries based on meal plans that cater to their dietary needs.
With the key insights, I wanted to explore specifically target millennials who have partners with dietary restriction and the challenges it comes with prepping meals. Thus, I create the primary persona Judy:
Judy is a Public Health Researcher based in Minneapolis, MN. She has very active lifestyle. She and her partner share a love of cooking and traveling. But her husband isn't a strict vegetarian like Judy. Her husband pushes Judy to cook with interesting and diverse ingredients that can mimic the texture and umami flavor of meat.
Once I concluded my research, I formulate this problem statement:
I envision users like Judy to be able to utilize online shoppable recipes that could accommodate their dietary restrictions, budget, and household size. Most online shoppable recipes only use ingredients for single use recipe. It does not use multiple ingredients across several recipes. This was great if she wanted to make one recipe, but what if she wants to meal prep with multiple recipes while using the same ingredients? That way she can be save cost and cut down on food waste?
With this in mind, I went ahead and start to ideate these lo-fi screens:
These lo-fi screens explored the idea of how Judy can shop recipes based on types of meal plan or the feature sponsored chef’s recipe. As she select her recipes, she can add them to her favorites and view video content on how to cook them. She then can view these ingredients and add them to her cart if she desired to.
Next I wanted to flesh out my concept by further developing into mid-fi wireframes:
These mid-fi wireframes showcased mainly on the user flow by buying ingredients through the featured chef of the week/month.
This moodboard helped me to explore what Culini’s branding would look like. I was inspired by the bold retro patterns from Poketo and infused with culinary editorial magazine fonts like Bon Appetit. I pulled in some vibrant food photography along with bold UI graphics to tie the overall aesthetic together.
Once I established Culini's poppy mood with bold saturated colors I refined the visual design with this style tile:
This style tile infuses the editorial print along with bold UI graphics with clean iconography and food photography.
Here’s how my style tile and mood board translated into my hi-fi screens:
During the usability testing, all participants provided valuable insight into the main app features:
But I also factored in the next steps my stakeholder should consider:
I knew as I delved into this mock client project I didn't want to create a typical eCommerce grocery delivery app. I wanted to explore into the niche market by encompassing on cooking and sustainability. Through Culini's data, I was able to back my approach by building user stories centered around millennials creating shareable meal plans. I found it interesting how the user's dietary restrictions, lifestyle, and living arrangements affects in their shopping and cooking habits.
Mostly, I enjoyed creating the visuals and exercising my branding skills as I further develop Culini's prototype. I love that I was able to pushed my creativity and styling by going with more editorial direction.
