GROCERYLIST++ TEAM ROLES PROBLEM AND SOLUTION OVERVIEW CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY CUSTOMERS ALYSSA

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1 GROCERYLIST++ TEAM ROLES Project Management: Staci Menz Writing: Darrin Cole Design: Anna Kong Development: Peter Huss User Testing: Brian Chan PROBLEM AND SOLUTION OVERVIEW The problem we are trying to solve is that there are many applications out there now that allow you to find recipes or make shopping lists, but there aren t many applications that do both of these things. People want to be able to track what is in their pantry/fridge and use that knowledge to find recipes to make. Our solution to this problem is to create an application that will allow you to keep track of what is in your pantry/fridge, search for recipes, and create a shopping list directly. CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY CUSTOMERS ALYSSA Who: Alyssa (stay at home mom) How recruited: Close Friend Background: 21 years old, shopping for a family of three (herself, boyfriend, and 4yr old son) Skills: Cooking classes in high school, been in charge of cooking for her family for several years When interviewing Alyssa I had her walk me through her process for deciding what to cook for dinner, creating the shopping list, going out and getting the ingredients needed, and beginning to cook dinner. She generally plans only a couple of meals at a time, and only plans specifically for dinner. She starts by checking what is in her fridge and pantry, looking for a base to center the meal around (usually some kind of meat or pasta). While still in the kitchen, she looks for recipes involving the base she chose on her Kindle Fire. When looking at recipes she looks for ones that would be the cheapest in terms of the ingredients required that she doesn t currently have. Throughout the entire process, finding ways to save money is always at the front of her mind. When determining what recipes are cheaper than others, she considers what she already has in her fridge or pantry that she could substitute for ingredients she doesn t have (for example a recipe might ask for fresh tomatoes but she has canned ones), or ingredients she can leave out entirely (in the case where it asks for a particular spice she doesn t have). When she s found a recipe she wants to make, she writes down everything she needs on a piece of paper, and always checks the essentials - milk, eggs, olive oil, etc., since those are the things that she will assume she already has when looking at recipes. Once she has her list ready, she checks the local paper to see if there are any coupons or sales going on, to determine what store to go to.

2 Then she finally goes out shopping, and always brings her son Owen along. As a young kid he can be hard to handle at times - something to keep in mind when designing parts of our application that would potentially be used instore (quick and easy so that she can still keep an eye on her son). When they are all done and are back from the store, she begins preparing dinner immediately; using the fresh ingredients she just bought. She is careful to keep in mind how much she already has of certain ingredients, and how much she needs, so that she never buys too much. This is a strategy for saving money, since if she only buys what they need then nothing goes to waste. PHOTOS Checking the pantry

3 Writing down a shopping list of ingredients needed for the recipe Checking the shopping list while buying the ingredients at the store

4 CHIN Who: Chin (Cook at local restaurant) How recruited: Parent Background: A cook at a local restaurant and cooks for a family of three. Skills: Has been a cook for 20+ years. During the interview, I was walked through the process of planning a few days worth of meals before going to the store to buy groceries for the week. Chin started off by checking the fridge and pantry and sees what was available. After finding out what was available, he thought about what he wanted to make for the next few days. Since he is a cook, he never looks up recipes and knows them all by heart. If he wants to make something new, he finds out recipes from friends and remembers them. After figuring out what he wanted to make, he took out a pad of paper and wrote down what meal he would make and what date he would make it. Underneath the meal, he wrote down what ingredients that he still needed. Next, he got another page to write the shopping list. He writes a separate shopping list because he also includes other things that he needs to buy for the house. On the shopping list, he makes two columns; on the left, he lists the ingredients that he has to get from specialty stores. In the right column, he lists the rest of the ingredients along with household items. PHOTOS Meals list for a few days

5 Shopping list (Left: Specialty list, Right: Rest) ANTHONY Who: Anthony How recruited: Parent Background: 55 years old, shops for wife and himself. Skills: Enjoys cooking - works part time as a chef at a senior center. Prepared dinner daily for 4 people until children went to college. During this interview, I learned about Anthony s process for planning meals and grocery shopping. He goes grocery shopping approximately four times a week, buying around 25 items each time. He cooks an average of two meals per day (breakfast and dinner) for his wife and himself. Anthony either goes to a restaurant for lunch or skips that meal. When he goes to the store, he generally buys the ingredients for dinner that night and the following night. He rarely will bring a shopping list with him since he is able to memorize the ingredients in his favorite dishes. When he does look up a recipe for a meal (usually once a week), he does it from a book or online recipe website and will write things down on paper as a checklist. When his wife Laura requests things, he will also write those things down. When he doesn t use a list, he often forgets to buy things which can require additional trips to the store or changing his meal plan. Also recalling his mental checklist at the store can take time. Writing stuff down on paper

6 ends up saving time in the end. While at the grocery store, Anthony finds himself returning to certain aisles (such as the produce section) multiple times since he doesn t always remember all the produce, meat, or dairy at once. KAREN Who: Karen How recruited: Family Friend Background: 45 years old, single mother of 3 kids (ages 14, 16, and 20) Skills: full time CPA consultant I first started by asking Karen to host one of our weekly dinner parties via . Karen replied with the usual yes and asked how many people would be coming, and I replied six. She then asked if there were any dietary restrictions she would need to take into account, and I told her that one is a gluten-free vegetarian. Karen said she would gladly host for us the following day. When we arrived at Karen s the next day, there was a platter of vegetables and crackers with goat cheese waiting for us to snack on. As we approached the snacks Karen said you better eat those all, girls. They were about to go bad in the fridge. I asked her what was for dinner and she said she was making a chicken pot roast in the crock pot because she knew she was going to get off work late and she wanted the cook something that could be ready when she got off work with minimal effort on her part. Karen generally plans out her meals last minute right before she is about to get off work. She chooses between take-out or cooking a home-cooked meal, depending on how tired she is. When Karen feels guilty for grabbing take-out for her family, she decides on her home cooked meals based on what she already has in her fridge that is about to go bad. This requires a trip home to actually see what s in her fridge and pantry, then a trip to the grocery store if she is low on certain ingredients. CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY RESULTS During our contextual inquiries, one common task that we found across all target customers was that all of them needed to check their pantry and/or fridge to see what ingredients they already had. They also were all concerned with saving money and being careful not to buy too much of any one thing. This in particular seems to be an important goal that all of our customers will share. Another commonality among our interviewees was that almost all of them only plan their meals one or two days in advance, and go shopping for fresh ingredients rather frequently. This is something that we should keep in mind, since adding functionality for planning for meals way in advance would probably not be wanted by most of our customers. Also, all of them tried to tailor their meals around what ingredients they already had; in addition to whatever they already had in mind. They wanted to save money by not having to buy all new ingredients and not waste the food available. A task unique to Alyssa was that she looks for potential substitutes for ingredients, or ingredients she can leave out entirely when looking at recipes, as a strategy for saving money. A task unique to Anthony was collaborating with his wife about grocery shopping. Sometimes he would go to the store and realize he hadn t bought milk in a week, so he would buy a half-gallon. However his wife would also notice that they needed milk and buy it as well. Situations in which multiple family members do the grocery shopping require extra planning.

7 A task unique to Karen is within the recipe sections. Karen wants to be able to see how many people made a certain recipe, she wants to see lots of pictures associated with each recipe; details regarding the prep/cook, reviews, and difficulty; and user recommendations for tweaking a recipe. These features are important to her because she isn t an experienced cook, and so she often relies on the public to help her decide what to make. A task unique to Chin is that he rarely looks up new recipes, and typically has them all memorized. If he ever wants a new one, he finds it in a magazine or asks a friend. ANALYSIS OF NEW AND EXISTING TASKS Before doing our contextual inquiries, we were already aware of several existing tasks that we knew our customers would want to be able to perform with our application. The most important of these include searching for and finding recipes, maintaining a list of ingredients that you already have in your pantry and/or fridge, and creating a shopping list directly from the ingredients listed for recipes. As part of the recipe searching task, we expect our users will also want to be able to filter recipe search results so that they only see ones that fit certain requirements. We discovered many new tasks as a result of our contextual inquiries, many of which reflect a desire to save money. For example, users may want to find substitutes for listed ingredients, or choose to exclude them from the recipe entirely in order to save money on the ingredients they would have to buy. An alternative to that would be the ability to edit ingredient amounts in recipes, since it is quite common to make more or less of a given recipe depending on the number of people you are cooking for. Another money-saving task users might want to be able to do is compare the costs of various recipes based on the cost of the ingredients they would need to purchase to make the recipe. To establish a starting point when looking for recipes, many customers decide on a base for their meal (usually some kind of meat or pasta) and search for recipes involving that base. We also found that many users have favorite recipes that they enjoy making a lot, so they may want the ability to add to and maintain a list of favorite recipes. Many customers also shop for several people, so the ability to synchronize shopping lists between members of a household would help eliminate duplicate purchases. On a related note, some customers plan several days worth of meals in advance, so the ability to make a single shopping list from several recipes and to store these recipes for future use would be helpful. Finally, some of the people interviewed separate their shopping lists into categories (produce, meat, fish, dairy, etc.) in order to make their shopping more efficient, so adding the ability to sort a shopping list into categories may be a useful task to support. THREE TASKS THE APPLICATION WILL SUPPORT SIMPLE: SHOPPING FOR GROCERIES FROM A LIST High frequency, High importance As our app is primarily centered around making grocery shopping as easy as possible, shopping for groceries from a shopping list is the most basic and simple task that our users will want to accomplish. Users want to be able to easily add to and remove from their shopping list, and be able to check off items as they are purchased (or put in their cart while in-store). To help make their shopping as efficient as possible, our application will allow them to quickly sort their groceries by categories. We expect this to be a high frequency task since most of the users we interviewed go shopping for groceries several times a week. It is also a high importance task; since the main

8 purpose of our app is to create a shopping list from recipes that you ve found, and use that list to make your grocery shopping experience easier. MODERATE: FINDING A RECIPE THAT FITS THE USER S NEEDS Moderate frequency, Moderate importance This task involves using a search function to find recipes tailored to the user s specific criteria. These criteria may include dietary restrictions (vegetarian, vegan, kosher, etc.); finding recipes that utilize ingredients the user already owns; different types of cuisine, like Chinese or Italian; or choosing recipes for a specific meal, like lunch or dinner. Next, the user would create a grocery list from the recipe s ingredients and shop for them as in the simple task. This task is moderate because it combines two distinct steps, namely searching for a recipe and then managing a grocery list while shopping for the ingredients. Our contextual inquiry results show that many shoppers already have lists of favorite recipes or have recipes memorized, making this list of moderate frequency and importance. COMPLEX: BUILDING A HOUSEHOLD SHOPPING LIST Low frequency, Moderate importance In many families there are multiple people adding items to the household shopping list, and sometimes more than one person will shop for groceries. They need a way to keep their list in sync so that everyone gets the food they want. In addition, people accidentally buying the same thing twice can be an issue. Families will often tackle this problem by having a shopping list that everyone has access to (such as on a refrigerator). This can easily be translated into a collaborative synchronized list in our application which an entire family is able to edit. However, we consider this to be low frequency since usually the parents have more control over the meals being served. SKETCHES OF IMPORTANT SCREENS IDEA 1

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