oChef
— Guided cooking
Summary —
oChef is a touch projection interface that works as a cooking assistant that helps you prepare
your recipe with an intuitive and helpful step by step process.
The system allows you to create your
profile according to your personal preferences and guides you throughout the cooking process, starting from
selecting your recipe until having your meal ready to be served.
Create your profile.
Diet habits, allergies, personal preferences and cooking tools can be personalized when you create your oChef profile.
Connect any mobile app.
Your recipe is in a mobile application? Just send the recipe to oChef and cook your favorite meal.
Cook your meal!
Real step-by-step videos and clear instructions to guide you through the cooking process.
Project Goal
Improve the step-by-step experience when cooking and combine it with an innovative technology that allowed the users to interact in a fast an easy way while preparing their food.
— Skip the Design Process
Design Process —
Context
The recipe world has changed dramatically due to technological advances having hundreds of mobile applications and websites that explain step by step how to prepare your recipe... but how could we improve that experience?
Market research
Taking Tasty and Yummly as a starting point for the project, the analysis of both platforms gave us a clear idea, basic content and several features for a recipe-based cooking system.
Technology research
Our first approach was interactive projection because we had access to a product with this technology. So we decided to use it and explore the possibilities and limitations of this technology and also guide the project towards functional prototype and not only a virtual concept.
Research results
The project was not intended to create a new platform, but to work as a tool that could connect to existing applications and focus on the user experience when performing the step-by-step process in a digital and innovative way.
It's important to highlight the fact that throughout the project, the Sony Xperia Projector allowed us to define some ground rules to use this technology and apply them into the design concepts.
Cooking scenario
To validate the user needs, we decided to go through the cooking process ourselves. The whole process was divided in two main parts: “pre-cooking” where the user prepares the ingredients and sets everything to start cooking & “cooking process” where the user goes through the step-by-step cooking.
Features needed
We did a brainstorm of features that would improve the user experience. These features were filtered between the ones that were necessary and the ones that were not necessary for the system.
Information architecture
After analysing the user journey (cooking scenario) and the user needs (features) we created the flow for general use cases. We validated the features with some possible users.
Design iterations
Once we had the technology, the user needs and the basic content, we created concepts for the interface design. We started creating sketches on paper to analyze them and turn them into digital low fidelity wireframes.
Wireframes
The main challenge was to decide which information was necessary for the user. Finally we placed clear and simple CTA’s (Call to Action) for the user inside the step-by-step process.
Visual aproach & Animations
We decided to create a set of animated icons and mix them with real life videos and images to help the user get the information in an easier way.
Interface research
Moodboards for the look & feel to get a sense of how the interface could look like. The layout, animation and visual elements were based in the decisions from previous phases.
Interface elements
All the visual elements from the final interface were designed by us: icons, photos and videos. The interface colors were tested several times to assure that they could be displayed in different surfaces and light scenarios.
Cooking videos
As an extra challenge, we had to create our own step-by-step cooking videos in order to have a nice visual result for our concept. We created a small setup with the top-view camera, recorded the whole process and finally edited the video to create the small loops used in the final prototype.
