CookJam leverages community recipe sharing to evoke memories grounded in different places.

Timeframe
5 Weeks
Role
Product Design, User Research
Team
Rochel, Osama, Jessica, Sukky
Tools
Figma
0/7 Context
In this project, we focused on the
deciding
stage of one's cooking journey and sought to make the complex process easier.
People decide when and what to cook every day. Aside from each recipe's desirability, time, and ingredients, dietary restrictions and preferences as well as the cook’s skill level in the kitchen all play critical roles in deciding what food to prepare.
1/7 Research Insights
Surveys and interviews with 10+ international students show common grounds in their cooking habits.
We decided to focus on international students, who are more inclined to cook their meals instead of eating out. There're more than 1M foreign students enrolled at U.S. higher education, representing 4.6% of the total U.S. student population.
Alleviate homesickness through making indigenous food
People often turn to cooking cultural meals from their hometown when they miss home or are feeling down in foreign places to recreate the feelings and heartwarming memories they once had.
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Can not find the right cultural recipes easily, often seek help from family
People often have trouble finding the right recipes for what they want to cook because they can be unfamiliar with them or had other channels in accessing them before.
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Have limited time and budget to organize each meal
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Overwhelmed by all the learnings a student have to do, it can be hard for students to spare time to decide what to eat, have a stable time slot for cooking each day, or do grocery trips at their will.
2/7 Problem Statement
Piecing together our findings, we asked:
"
How might we help international students alleviate homesickness through the meals they have and finding the recipes for them?
"
Emtional Needs
  • Feel comfortable and safe with familiar tastes
  • A reminder of eating food back at hometown
  • Feel less intimidated by the skills required to cook
  • A “feel good” factor after making a dish that tastes similar to home
  • Care about the quality and taste of food
Functional Needs
  • A time-saving way to get recipe for a busy week
  • Get recipe that come from home country
  • Be cognizant of space at home especially with flatmates
  • A way to help them decide what to cook when they don’t know what should cook
3/7 Ideation
Explored the contexts, behaviors, and emotion underlying each solutions before reaching the final idea —— CookJam.
By identifying homesickness as the motivation for cooking, we opened up conceptual possibilities with Crazy 8 sketches.
Deciding what to cook can be a
lonely
task.
‍
‍
CookJam
Making decision into a
community
thing can eliminate decision making fatigue.
CookJam
Must cook with available
resources
or what to get where.
‍
CookJam
4/7 Storyboard
Illustrations imagined situational context, where youngsters evoke memories grounded in different places through receiving indigenous recipes from moms.
5/7 Solution
CookJam supports meal decision making and alleviate homesickness for foreigner students by providing a recipe shared space for cultural food and channels to connect with the community back home.
We decided to embed CookJam in NYT Cooking app, one of the largest cooking app with a diverse range of cultural recipes and ingredients one could find in the U.S. It offers a large database of quality recipes as well as the tools and expertise to help home cooks from students to amateur chiefs prepare great meals.
Task Flow 1 (Invite sender)
Send request to your loved ones alongside your preferences, ingredients available, and a personal note.
Task Flow 2 (Invite sender)
Receive recipe playlist made just for you and leave comments for more information. Now, you are ready to meal prep and cook.
Task Flow 3 (Invite receiver)
Got notification from your loved ones miles away, approved the request, and start putting together a recipe playlist with the existing database.
Task Flow 4 (Invite receiver)
Leave notes or special reminders for people you are making the playlist for to support their cooking process.
6/7 Evaluation
We found that first, our design also resonate with the friends and family back home.
Our team conducted additional interviews with people back home(moms/dads), product walkthroughs with subject matter experts, and usability testings to further validate our design.
"It really touches on how parents are willing to do anything to help their children no matter where they are."
"Not just the recipe itself, we can also teach them the origin or meaning behind each indigenous dish they make."
"For me, it depends on how much my kids engage with this feature. It determines how much I want to get involved as well.”
But we also had to change a few things.
Multi-language support to make CookJam inclusive and accessible for hometown communities
7/7 Takeaways
What I learned from the project as a product designer.
Understanding comics and its visual sequences
Comic book panels can be designed to change one's perception of time. It can be manipulated through the content, the underlying motion, and the experience. In this project, I learnt to map out visual sequences of users' interactions on a page, filling the entire user flow with the pace that is more usable to users.
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One size fit one v.s. One size fit all
How do we make design inclusive? Once we settle down on a few one size fit one ideas, we can zoom out and modify them considering the permanent, temporary, and situational challenges users may have. Our idea initially was to connect students and thier moms before we decided to make it accessible to all friends and family.
Iterating your HMW with research insights
Asking a good HMW question is crucial to how viable the solution will end up. To get a good HMW, we tried iterating our mission statements through asking why and what's stopping user now for each. It ultimately led us to adding an emotional layer of tackling "homesickness", which gave us a chance to truly meet users’ needs with our solution.
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