Fridge Roulette

Role: Collaborative Designer, Branding Specialist, Stakeholder Presentation Lead

Tools: Figma, Canva, Google Slides, Google Drive

2023

In the realm of culinary creativity and resourcefulness, Fridge Roulette emerges as a revolutionary app designed to tackle the ubiquitous challenge of leftover food and its associated waste. Embracing the concept of transforming odds and ends into culinary masterpieces. Fridge Roulette empowers users to take inventory of their kitchen's hidden treasures and unlock a world of delectable possibilities. By seamlessly generating recipes tailored to the ingredients at hand, Fridge Roulette not only minimizes food waste but also injects an element of delightful surprise into the cooking experience.

Our Value

Many people often ask themselves, “What do I want to make for dinner tonight?” Due to the way food is packaged and purchased we find ourselves with excess stock we don’t know how to properly utilize, wasting both money and time. Fridge Roulette helps to combat that otherwise wasted overstock with aggregated recipes from those ingredients!

With Fridge Roulette we hope to accomplish:

  • Minimizing household food waste

  • Saving users money on groceries 

  • Inspire users to try new creative recipes

  • Rid users of “food rut” 

  • Help users use ALL the groceries they but each week

Research Phase

To Determine the “What” and “Why” of Our Users Needs

In order to validate our concept and ensure that the application would be both useful and well-received by the public, we conducted extensive market research and user analysis. During the initial research phase, we established a preliminary user persona to guide our understanding of our target audience. We then conducted in-depth public interviews, carefully mapped out our findings, and conducted additional interviews to fill in any gaps in our data. This process allowed us to validate some of our initial assumptions while also prompting us to reconsider certain aspects of our original concept. The insights gained from this comprehensive research were instrumental in shaping our first round of prototyping and ensuring that the features we prioritized aligned with the needs and expectations of our users.

Our main interview and research objectives were to determine how people decide what to eat. Can we help people save time with meal planning? How can we help people waste less food? Do people budget for groceries?

We found that 100% of the people interviewed throw out food weekly, Around 75% stated they find home cooking to be repetitive and boring. 82% said they suffer from decision fatigue and a lack of creativity when cooking night after night. Over 50% feel as though home cooking is repetitive and boring, and around 85% said they felt they lacked a skillset in the kitchen in some regard to be able to keep home meals new, fresh and interesting.

This challenged some of our ideas and assumptions for the creation of this application and allowed us to pivot from an app that would focus solely on excess kitchen stock. Instead also includeing ways to make meal prep and planning fun and interesting.

Now that we had a good idea of what our users needs and goals were we wanted to paint a picture of one way Fridge Roulette could be used in a real world serinero.

Competitor Analysis

We then wanted to take a look to see if anything like this already existed, and if so what were our competitors strengths and areas for improvement that we could capitalize on.

We found that there weren’t many options out there that were comparable to what we were envisioning. That being said some of our takeaways were keeping features to a minimum to prevent user fatigue was a must, in addition providing a place for users to bookmark recipes seemed like a feature that would be appreciated by our users.

Iteration and Testing Phase

Despite facing a challenging timeline, we meticulously navigated the iteration and testing phase. We mapped out a comprehensive user flow to gain a clear understanding of how users would interact with the application. Employing a three-phase prototyping approach, we began with paper prototypes, progressed to low-fidelity digital prototypes, and culminated in a high-fidelity prototype. Throughout this process, we incorporated user feedback from both low-fidelity and high-fidelity testing, refining the product at each stage. The result is a final application that we are confident will exceed user expectations.

Color and Branding Choices

To evoke a sense of nostalgia and inspire a return to home cooking, we opted for a vintage-inspired aesthetic for our application. We complemented this with a vibrant color palette to maintain user engagement and combat end-of-day fatigue, aligning seamlessly with the app's gamification elements. Maintaining a minimalist approach, we carefully selected a limited color scheme and chose the name "Fridge Roulette" to convey to new users one of our core features: the ability to generate recipes with a single click.

Elements We Added and Why

Being able to add ingredients and spin a “roulette” wheel makes a simple, fun and engaging way for users to find new recipes to try with their leftover kitchen stock.

Laying out easy recipe steps and clear time frames makes it easy for you to plan your meals in according with your time and skills.

With our user testing we found a few user flow and layout flaws. Our key feedback we needed to make updates to included the following:

- Carry the nav bar through every page

- Add more clear or labeled iconography

- The home and the back button are too close together

- Fix points of confusion between roulette function and main recipe page

User Testing and Feedback

Fridge Roulette’s Final Form

Based on user testing and feedback, we have made the following necessary updates:

- Moved the home button to the bottom of the navigation bar for easier access.

- Added onboarding to introduce and explain features to new users.

- Updated the formatting of the homepage to improve usability.

- Added labels to iconography for clarity.

- Included the bottom navigation on every page to improve user flow and navigation.

Overall, Fridge Roulette is a well-designed app that is easy to use and enjoyable to interact with. The app's features and design elements work together to create a user experience that is both efficient and fun.

Due to the tight timeline of this project there were some things we were unable to prototype. Our hopes for the future are to add a barcode scanner option to more easily add your fridge and pantry items to the database, a community aspect for users to be able to share recipes with each other and a section dedicated to “eco friendly kitchen tips” where you can learn how to use food scraps for alternative purposes.