overview

Home chefs and their customers have a rough time when it comes to order logistics. MetaChefs gives people a digital space to share home made food within their community. Our aim is to make it simple for our customers to live a healthy lifestyle and for our home chefs to earn an income from their very own kitchen.

My Role

Led the design and development of the product's end-to-end experience and oversaw aspects related to business development and vision execution. I conducted research and set up metric and analytic frameworks to formulate evidence-based product outcomes.

timeline

Sept 2021 - Current (10 months)

tools

Sketch, Git, React Native, Firebase, Stripe, Google Maps, + more.

Problem

Selling homemade food is hard.

While conducting early interviews with our potential users (home chefs & customers who love ordering out), many chefs expressed difficulty in maintaining a consistent routine while juggling pick up/drop off times and communicating effectively with customers. Typically, chefs would start by offering meals on an online marketplace only to abandon potential orders due to a multitude of platform issues.

Solution → Metachefs

A framework for meal creation and distribution.

Sharing food is an accessible way to increase the amount of healthy, affordable, and nutritious meal options.

The trend of selling home cooked meals has also grown significantly over the past years. Through our interviews, we’ve discovered that many people view selling their home made creations as a beneficial way to help their community.

The Recipe

Goals

Innovation with reason

Sharing is caring

First, we needed to help community members simply share their love of food with their community.

Build customers confidence and trust

Second, we needed to build customer's confidence and trust by making it simple to contact support and by enforcing strong safety measures for all chefs.

Rethink from base principles

Last but certainly not least, to create something truly innovative we needed to rethink from base principles.

RESEARCHing the problem space

Understanding behaviour

We interviewed a multitude of individuals, characterized as adults who are currently selling food from their home over an online marketplace and people who currently use apps to order ready-to-eat food. The questions focused on learning and understanding their habits, purpose, and past experiences.

Customers wanted to use this service to support their community, try out new culturally diverse flavors, and get a healthy meal when they are running low on time and energy.

Home Chefs wanted to use MetaChefs to pursue their foodie passion, work within a flexible schedule, and earn extra income on the side.

MAIN INSIGHTS

Identifying the Commonalities

The themes discovered from the user & chef interviews revealed common experiences of people’s perception and purpose of ordering from home kitchens.

The ordering process needs to be seamless

“For me, I love to try out new food but I don't like pre-ordering meals. When I'm hungry I usually want something as soon as possible."

Trust and safety is of utmost importance

“I like the idea of ordering from chefs who have gone through some type of certification to make sure that the food is prepared in a safe environment.“

Approaching a Solution

System Architecture

The navigation framework visualized how people would move through the app. Mapping out key path scenarios gets our users to their most prominent use cases within the least amount of steps. Since our users are also likely to be looking to order their next meal, we intentionally made the ordering process as simple as possible.

LOW-FIDELITY Mockups

We went back to the basics by first establishing consistency then building upon the foundations of the product to create a memorable experience for the user. We started with low-fidelity mockups after determining our user task flow and continued iterating collaboratively.

ITERATION

Workflow challenges

Technical feasibility

We were challenged with the technical feasibility in incorporating our proposed feature ideas as well as meeting the deadlines. This led us to think about the product more intuitively to determine the right core feature(s) we wanted to successfully attain for the MetaChefs mobile app.

Created the branding and facilitated in the strategy for marketing the product

Taking a second look at our proposed ideas and in doing a second round of market research for home cooking, we observed the use of graphical interfaces for displaying menu availability and chef scheduling.

RESULTS

Simplifying the product features for a seamless digital journaling experience

Centering the core experience on the “must-have” features

Given the time and technical resources we had, the group agreed on removing the “should-have” and “nice-to-have” features. It was important to focus on our technical capabilities and to ensure that we provided an exceptional user experience for these selected features.

Improving our technology stack for better user experience

Our goal diverted into finding a technical solution that would identify and analyze emotions from written text, thus uncovering user’s emotions while using the app. We researched APIs that would allow for analyzing emotions through user input text, and discovered the Watson Tone Analyzer, by IBM.

INTRODUCING THE FINAL DESIGNS

MetaChefs

A community food platform that makes it easy for community members to live a healthy lifestyle and for our home chefs to make an income from their very own kitchen. — Your favorite food is right next door

Onboarding + SignUp

1‍

We strived to add a meaningful onboarding and sign up process which would delight & inform our new users.

Garnish for special moments

Meal preparation was a key function of MetaChefs which is why it needed to be implemented into the main app.

Available when you crave it

The intuitive ordering system guides the customer through every step needed to get their order to their door.

Reflections

Key takeaways

In working with the team, I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to help take a flagship product from 0 to 1. Naturally, I've come away with a few lessons which I've found to be widely applicable.

Our design system focused on strengthening and improving communication for all team members to build consistency in the product’s visuals. Better communication led to efficient project workflows which saved our team valuable time and ensured that we were able to execute the product to its fullest.

Collaboration Skills

A team effort, where each member is working together (designers and developers) to articulate and document the use of components, so that when it came to developing them, we understood the use of each specific functionality. Involving everyone from the beginning also helped with designing and building the components needed.

Systems Thinking

We made it a priority to focus on UI aspects such as color, typography, styles, and weight. When it came to developing each unique component and screen, this strategy allowed us to correctly translate the style guides to the right style properties

Communication is key

Beginning with research, moving to design, and ending on development, our detailed process allowed our team to communicate throughout this project. Knowing our users and practicing strong listening skills will continue to help this project innovate into the future.

MetaChefs

Selling homemade food is hard.

A framework for meal creation and distribution.

The Recipe

Innovation with reason

Understanding behaviour

Identifying the Commonalities

System Architecture

Workflow challenges

MetaChefs

Key takeaways

Let's build something great.