Designing Kitchens for Families: A UX Journey into Smart Grocery Shopping & Cooking Innovation with ChefMate

Contributors: Joo Gyeong Kim, Kaylie Marie Nakaya, Saan Lily Popović, Violet Monserate

Problem Overview

Every family needs to eat; however, time is not on the side of a busy parent. For many families, especially those with young children, meal preparation can feel more like a stressful chore than an enjoyable bonding experience. Through our user research, we learned that time, followed by money, are the two things that parents struggle with most often. Parents are constantly juggling their busy schedules with budgeting for weekly grocery trips. Many spend a great amount of time planning, shopping, and cooking meals for their family. In the end, while they’d like to get their children involved in cooking and meal planning, they simply cannot find the time and energy to do so.

While numerous solutions already exist — such as meal delivery kits, same-day grocery delivery services, parent support groups, and “family-friendly” recipes available online — parents often find them insufficient to meet their needs. Our survey respondents expressed that this support is not always enough to overcome the challenges that keep families from having healthy, regular meals.

Our Solution: ChefMate!

To improve upon existing solutions, we have designed ChefMate. ChefMate is so much more than just a refrigerator. Assisting users in developing cost-effective grocery lists based on weekly grocery prices and recommending meals tailored to a family’s time constraints, dietary preferences, and available ingredients, ChefMate is a smart refrigerator that utilizes artificial intelligence to provide personalized recommendations.

Additionally, ChefMate includes a “child mode” setting for parents of young children to help them to easily include their children with cooking. A suite of sensors and cameras within the refrigerator enables the ChefMate to precisely determine which ingredients are available. With the addition of spotlights, ChefMate directs any user toward the right ingredients for their chosen recipe and which are going bad. The child-mode will use this feature and others to aid parents when involving their children in dinner preparation and cooking by simplifying recipes and providing small tasks for young children. Not only will this help parents teach their children cooking skills, but it will also help build connections with them. ChefMate is not only here to make cooking easier, but also to create a community in the kitchen and provide every member of the household with the opportunity to express their creativity through cuisine.

Initial sketch of ChefMate

Paper Prototype & Usability Tests

After creating our initial design and sketches, we proceeded to create a detailed paper prototype of the different pages on our ChefMate refrigerator’s screen. These interactive paper prototypes were made to test our design and improve features before building digital mockups. These paper prototypes were not static and were designed with different workflows in mind. To allow users to interact with the prototypes during testing.

During user testing, the first task was from the perspective of a parent who is preparing the kitchen for the week. There is food in the fridge (including ingredients that had gone bad), and we asked the parent to (a) generate a list of recipes to make for the week and (b) generate the groceries and shopping list necessary for the week! They used the screen on the refrigerator to accomplish these tasks. The second task during user testing was from the perspective of a child in the kitchen. We asked for the parents to bring their child or imagine they were cooking with their child. We told the parents to select a recipe to cook together and turn on child-mode. We told the children to imagine their parents had asked them to help out in the kitchen, and their task is to use the refrigerator and follow its directions to help their parents cook the recipe.

[some of our paper prototypes are shown above]

Task 1: Generate recipes for the week

Task 2: Cook with children

Through testing our initial prototype with other designers in the course, we found two major issues: (1) we were missing some buttons that would improve the user’s navigation experience (such as the back button and home button), reducing the safety of the system, and (2) putting the child mode button too low down may cause problems if the children can toggle it themselves. Considering the feedback we collected during this user testing, we revised our paper prototype before testing it with our target users.

Notable features that were initially included in our prototype include the ability to set up a profile with meal preferences and portion sizes, scroll through and select different fields (recipes, ingredients, and portion sizes), a home button in the bottom right, and a labeled homescreen. As we continued to refine the prototype, we added, removed, and modified features to ensure users had seamless experience with ChefMate.

The second round of usability tests was conducted with multiple mothers, a father, and two children pretending to cook with their parents, which allowed us to see how our real user base would interact with ChefMate. During the process, we discovered that it was critical to include a guide or help page detailing each feature, as some users were confused and missed some of ChefMate’s features entirely. The other most significant change we had to make to our prototype was to add a calendar feature. Some usability test participants were looking for a feature that would allow them to plan their meals for the week. They stated they wished for more detailed planning rather than just our initial functionality of saving recipes. These participants hoped to be able to see which ingredients they need to save and which they need for each day.

Above shows the complete layout of the final paper prototype after user testing

This essential feedback was directly taken into consideration when revising our design and creating the final digital mockup.

Major changes made during usability testing process

Digital Mockup

After conducting usability tests and reviewing the participants’ feedback, we incorporated their input into our paper prototypes to enhance our design. Once we refined and finalized the paper prototypes, we created a digital version of the prototypes to show ChefMate’s screen.

Above is our completed digital mockup of ChefMate’s interface

[Link to prototype: https://www.figma.com/design/JQej8UoE18IzCUn1cXzr7t/CSE440---ChefMate-Digital-Prototype?node-id=0-1&p=f&t=0ppQlteyP0yMLUEL-0]

Task 1: Generate recipes for the week

Task 2: Cook with children

Summary

We all need to eat balanced meals to stay healthy, but meal planning and cooking can be challenging, especially for those who are busy, including parents of young children. ChefMate supports these individuals who are seeking an efficient way to tackle this problem. However, we also hope that the new ease of cooking with ChefMate will help users view cooking as a form of creativity and a bonding opportunity by removing the stress from the question of “what’s for dinner?” By providing meal-planning, grocery shopping, and child-mode features, we believe this innovative solution will encourage users to continue exploring and learning cooking skills, enabling them to spend more time connecting with others inside and outside of the kitchen.