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SavEat
2018


SavEat is a solution for those who love to cook, eat well and save money in the meanwhile. It is the result of a 2-week design sprint where I was tasked to create a mobile app that could solve a day-to-day problem for a fellow student. For this assignment, I was paired with Vivien Chin. Through user research, I was able to identify one major pain point in her daily routine and propose a solution to address it.

Concept project @ General Assembly.






Discovery & Research

This was our first project in our first week at the General Assembly’s course, therefore, we knew nothing about each other.

To get some insights into how Vivien’s routine goes, I conducted a 30 minutes interview where I asked questions regarding her background, what brought her to London, the first things she did when she got up and when she came home from work, about her commute, who she lived with and much more. It was a deep dive to better understand her life and daily frustrations.

This interview led me to a few key takeaways: Vivien is a young professional who moved to London in 2016. She is a foodie who loves to explore new places and being out with friends. She also thoroughly enjoys cooking and, as living in London can be very expensive, she tries to cook at home as often as possible as a way to save money. Some ingredients she likes, though, can be hard to find and pricey.

To further investigate how her cooking habits influence her overall schedule and budget, I asked her to describe her experience from hungry to full. A User Journey and an Experience map helped me better visualize her behaviors and emotions.






Problem Definition

Through these exercises, it was clear she had to go through different digital tools and places that cost her a lot of time and patience and 2 major frustrations stood out:

01. Choosing a recipe was a hard task.

02. Ingredients price-searching was a decisive yet annoying part of the process.

The definition of a problem statement helped me set a clear goal for the product: Vivien needs to find good new recipes to make as often as possible because she wants to cook and save money for travels and fun moments.






Ideation

With this, I started thinking and sketching possibilities of products and features that could help Vivien in her cooking journey.

The proposed MVP to solve Vivien’s problem is a location-based groceries price-tracking app that would suggest daily recipes based on discounted items. This way she would always be inspired and know where to go for the best deals.

To test this idea I created a user flow and a paper prototype, which you can see here, considering a happy path for this product.






Visual Design

For the look and feel of the product, inspiration came from brands like Airbnb and Mailchimp. Both with the same values as I defined for SavEat based on Vivien’s persona: caring, fresh, young, reliable and fun.

The voice description and mood board informed my visual design decisions for the style guide and user interface.







Testing & Iterations

As the basic functions and features had already been tested and iterated on, testing the hi-fi prototype revealed issues mostly related to copy and small interactions:







The solution
SavEat (/Save it/) helps the user take quicker and smarter decision related to her cooking and money-saving habits.
It’s a simple and effective solution that can be navigated by ingredients, recipes or recipes costs.




Clickable prototype 👆


Feedback
& Next Steps

Vivien thought this was a great start to solve some of her daily frustrations and with her feedback, some ideas for new features came up:

Favorite ingredients discount alert.
“Done recipes” list. 
Recipe customization.
Recipe sharing.
Online ingredients shopping with fast delivery.