Salt

The tasting experience 😍

Salt is a project that I worked on when I was focusing more on UI design. Taking on my new journey by enrolling in User Experience Design Immersive at General Assembly in Melbourne Australia, I decided to take this project for another run to practice the UX principles that I have learned.

“Because every dish needs a pinch of Salt.”

Salt is an app for food bloggers to publish their recipe blogs with ease. Focusing on high quality images of the food and the process, Salt is optimising one sense that human use for tasting experience, sight. 

Introduction

My role

  • Gathered qualitative & quantitative insights

  • Recruited participants and conduct user interview

  • Conducted usability testing

  • Synthesised findings

  • Provided design recommendations

  • Wire-framed the ideas

  • Designed the user interface

  • Prioritised features for implementation

  • 1 Product designer (myself)

My team

Key features

  • Allows users to share recipes.

  • Inventory of recipes that users can browse through.

  • Users can bookmark their favourite recipes.

  • User profile allows other users to see individual's shared recipes.

“Because every dish needs a pinch of Salt.”

Due to time constraints, and in effort to get accurate data, I have made sure the survey was channeled to relevant crowd. The survey has been posted to some Facebook groups eg. Tasty, Delicious, Tastemade, Buzzfeed food.

I also conducted user interviews to get more more insights in depth.

User research

Prioritising key factors

The biggest takeaways that I got from the survey and the user interview were very valuable it actually changed my initial direction of how I would like to improve the app. Chart below shows the factors that users count in upon deciding for new recipes for them to try:

User research

Synthesising User Research

🗒 Insights themes

Motivation

  • To unwind and they consider it as they're happy place

  • To feed the family and to get together

  • Hunger

Inspiration

  • Discovering new flavours

  • The outcome

  • Sharing the outcome with others

Frustration

  • Doesn’t turn out good or as expected

  • Complicated process

  • Trouble looking for ingredients

“I cook mainly for myself and make it up as I go, tasting and adjusting.”

The key feature that I wanted user to do with this app is to share their recipe. But from the user research has revealed that users are not looking into sharing their recipes online as they are already pretty occupied while cooking. The result requires me to take a sharp turn with my project direction, the research stating that the main feature of the app is not desirable to users. 

Define

Wireframing

Validating the design

I conducted further usability testing on high fidelity UI design, this is to study the user flow and to help me understand their pain points while using the app.

User interface design

User interface design

Next steps

Based on the result from the usability testing, I made few iterations to the wireframe and started implementing it to the UI design of the app.