The Stories on Our Plates
A meal kit service and mobile app that teaches users the history and culture behind international cuisines
Audience
Advanced home cooks and food enthusiasts
Goals
Teach users to recognize and understand the history and culture behind food. Deliver educational content about international cuisines and how to cook them.
Role
Research, Learning Design, UX Design, Prototype Development
Research
Using a mix of qualitative and quantitive methodologies, my research sought to understand user’s food values, food content habits, cooking preferences, and meal kit experience, and to test early food education concepts.
Personas
The Advanced Meal Kitter is someone who is already using a meal kit, but is starting to find the recipes too basic. She’s eager to advance her cooking skills and take on a new challenge.
The Well-Traveled Rural Cook is someone who loves to travel and wants to recreate meals he’s had abroad at home. He lives in a rural town and doesn’t have access to specialty ingredients to cook international cuisines.
Process Sketches + Wireframes
Insights + Features
Take learners on a trip to new destinations
For food enthusiasts, food and tourism are intertwined. They experience new locations primarily through its food and they use food to recreate their travels at home. This app frames the learning experience around destinations to inspire feelings of excitement and adventure.
Excite Users with stunning photography
It’s no surprise that people eat with their eyes first. Similar to food magazines, the mobile app prominently features stunning food photography to draw users into the meals and international locations they can experience in the service.
Help learners collect and catalog recipes
Meal kit users like to save the recipes they cooked and continued to cook them even after the service was cancelled. Because they are printed recipes, they can be easily lost and forgotten. Our app provides users with a food journal to save all the recipes they cooked, tag their favorites, and include recipe notes to adjust the meals to their preferences.
Motivate learners through social media
Social media is the first place many users go to find recipe inspiration. To keep users engaged in the course, this service delivers bite-sized lessons on social media to draw users back into the app to complete the full lessons.