Kitch Mobile App Design
Food is kind of an afterthought at the hospital and is an overlooked part of recovery. Patients miss their life but also their comforts, one of which is food. They want a better alternative, a service that cares about their customers well being and does not believe food should be an afterthought. They need a service that can provide nourishing meals with their dietary preference in mind. To the patients, the extra care could mean a difference in their mental well-being and recovery process.
client
project time
3 weeks
Deliverables
User Interview & Surveys
Understanding the tasks and motivations of the user group the project is designing for.
Domain Research
Understanding the stats on specific industry the project is designing for.
Competitive & Comparative Research
Report that summarizes the competitive landscape. Performing an item by item comparison of two or more websites or apps to determine trends or patterns.
Affinity Diagramming
Organize a large number of ideas, sorting them into groups based on their natural relationships, for review and analysis.
Personas
fictitious identity that reflects one of the user groups for who you are designing.
Storyboards
a visual sequence of events is used to capture a user’s interactions with a product.
Sitemap
A complete list of all the pages available on a website.
Wireframe
A rough guide for the layout of a website or app, done with pen and paper and with wireframing software.
Paper and Interactive Prototype
A rough guide for the layout of a website or app, giving an indication of the direction that the product is heading.
User Usability Testing
A user sits in front of the website and have them perform tasks and think out loud while doing so.
Medium-Fidelity Mobile App Platform Design Prototype
A prototype with limited functionality but clickable areas which presents the interactions and navigation possibilities of an application.
Opportunities
The project objective is to create a mobile app user experience that allows the users to make personalized orders from Kitch’s carefully curated menu and increase their sales. The project breaks off into two sections for UX team. We dedicated the first-week for research to find out who our users are, what are their pain points and their preference. During the second and the final week, we used the research we gathered to plan and design the app to mid fidelity then hand off to UI team for them to finish a high-fidelity design.
My Role
Conduct research on users to identify pain points and preferences. Use findings in collaboration with the UX and UI teammates to create an easy to use, customised and pleasant mobile app experience that reflects Kitch’s brand and meets Kitch’s business goals.
Research Phase
Who Kitch is for
From our user interviews, we found the end users are quite diverse but could be split into two general groups. First are the patients, our primary users, who need to stay at the hospital overnight. Second are hospital staff who are extremely busy attending to patients. We uncovered a lot of traits from each group that is opposite of the other. Patients had more free time but were restricted to their bed or ward, depending on their friends and families to bring meals or eat what the hospital provided. The staff have little free time, but they can walk around and have more meal options. They can bring meals from home or buy from a nearby cafeteria or restaurant. We predict that the patient group, in general, will provide more short-term users in comparison with staff who attend the hospital full-time and might access the app more frequently. However, we have determined that the patients will be our primary users to be as there’s no competition in the services available to them – that’s where Kitch can shine.
Competitive & Comparative Research
Affinity Diagramming
Insights
Make it easier for our end user
It’s very important for the end users to have this app simple to use. During our design phase, we constantly made sure to simplify and reduce the number of steps the user goes through to use the app. We added options including the ability to skip signing in right away and sign in at a later time, quick access to previous and favourite orders, daily suggestions, and apple pay and google wallet for faster payment. From our user testing, we got a lot of ideas for features to add in to make the app experience also feel premium. We added a food preference selector using simple to understand icons, an educational piece for feature ingredient and health benefit info, and chef’s greeting when you order your meal.
persona
George Hall
“I want to recover faster”
George is a successful businessman. He cares about his family include his loving wife. He recently got into an accident, and he has to put his working life on hold and be in the hospital. His wife takes care of him during his stay, but he doesn't want to put more work on her. His children are living far away, and it’s hard for them to fly back and visit him. He upgraded his hospital care package to premium believing he will get the best care possible
AGE:
65
OCCUPATION:
Businessman
NATIONALITY:
Canadian
PREFERENCES
To have an app that’s super simple like a text messenger
Healthy food with his food restrictions in mind that can help him back on his feet and back to do what he loves
to do
More time for him to be with his wife
FRUSTRATIONS
Not tech-savvy, difficult for him to use complicated mobile apps.
Disgusting hospital food
Difficult to order food with his food restrictions
STORYBOARDS
George got into an accident. He has to be in the hospital. He is sad.
The awful food from hospital does not make the situation any better.
All he wishes for is a good warm meal that can help him feel better so he can go back to do what he loves to do.
He tried to order food from a food delivery app but he finds it difficult to find the food he can eat.
Emily Zhang
“I care what I eat”
Emily is attorney. She is fluent in both Chinese and English but prefer use Mandarin. She lives in downtown Vancouver with her husband. Last month they brought a little girl named Gracie to this world so she is currently taking time off from work to take care of her baby and recover from postpartum. She cares about what she eats very much because she has diabetic. She is expecting to go back to work after her maternity leave.
AGE:
31
OCCUPATION:
Attorney
NATIONALITY:
Chinese Canadian
PREFERENCES
Healthy food with her food preferences in mind and help her to recover
Have a food ordering app in her language
FRUSTRATIONS
Hard to find meals with gluten free options
No time to cook
Worries she is not getting enough nutrition from her food
Busy husband can’t help her out all the time
STORYBOARDS
Emily is a English and Chinese speaking attorney. She is awesome at what she does.
She just had her baby girl Gracie. She is currently taking maternity leave.
All her wishes for is good warm meal that can help her recover from postpartum also it's sugar free.
She tried to cook but she is really tired from taking care of her baby girl and it would take too long to make.
User flow
Concept Stage
Kitch personal butler
During a brainstorming session trying to figure out an easier way to order food, one crazy idea that came up was text message ordering. It’s a UX pattern most people are familiar with, including seniors who are not very tech savvy with their phone or doctors who are overwhelmed with patient care and don’t have time to learn new tech. We believe it’s a great alternative to the annoying order form. Also, it creates a platform for one-to-one conversation between the customer and the Kitch service team to creates custom meal options for each user. We think it’s on brand with what Kitch is all about and we called it the Kitch personal butler because it’s like someone is always there to take good care of you.
Multilanguage
When we were learning about our users, we interviewed a lot English speaking users to find out about their needs and wants. We then realised it would be a missed opportunity to focus on monolingual users. This is especially true in Vancouver, a diverse multicultural city filled with residents from all over the world who speak English as a second language. No matter what culture you come from, everyone gets sick. As a team, we consist of members who all speak a second language, so we started to translate our questions into our mother tongue and diversify our findings. We found that the number one feature that non-English speakers ask for is having the ability to change and set to their language. We find that feature would be a great addition. Thinking back to when we first came to Canada and had difficulties communicating with other. Having that feature would not make a user be able to communicate with English speakers, but we hope it will make the hospital stay and food ordering process easier.
medium fidelity prototype
Conclusion
During the three week project, we worked really hard to put in as many features in to help their company grow. Even though the project timeline was short, I made a personal connection with our client and their end users and learned to be more compassionate and considerate user experience designer.
