Basil
September - December 2021
Product Manager
Problem Space
College students are experiencing a disconnect between their familiar home life and their new, independent lives. They struggle to integrate their home culture into their new environment and seek ways to connect with it outside of their childhood home.
Objective
Inspired by our own concerns with financial independence, full-time benefits, and complete freedom post-grad, we started out being interested in understanding the journey of young adults navigating post-college life.
We were interested in discovering how we can help young adults learn necessary life skills as they enter the workforce and maintain a work life balance, but with a possible finance focus in mind.
Design Process
We sought to look at how young professionals, both those in the working world and those about to enter, have transitioned from their university days into their adult life. Through interviews with three young adults, 2 of which were in the workforce and 1 who plans on entering it following college graduation, we were able to get a sense of what things excite these young professionals about adulthood and what still remains a cause for worry.
User Research
We assumed most young adults would be most concerned with financial literacy & independence. They are not.
They valued success and independence in their personal lives, including goals to eat healthier, exercise more, and stay connected with loved ones. Although financial awareness was a common pain point, users prefer learning from friends and family.
User interviews revealed that family disconnect was a major issue for students. To address this, we aimed to develop a recipe-sharing app that fosters connection through the shared language of food, allowing students to experience the comforting flavors of home.User interviews revealed that family disconnect was a major issue for students. To address this, we aimed to develop a recipe-sharing app that fosters connection through the shared language of food, allowing students to experience the comforting flavors of home.
Solution Prototyping
To allow us to build a functional app that hit the main needs of our user, we broke down the core functionality into 3 main blocks. This can be modeled with a user persona, 'Lisa'.
Lisa is feeling homesick at college and wants to recreate the Ethiopian spiced lamb stew recipe her mom always made for her growing up. Our app will allow Lisa to access her family's shared recipes and find the exact one her mom used to make.
Lisa's mom takes a photo of the family recipes that she has and uploads it to their family group on our app, allowing Lisa to get all the family's recipes in one place, where she can access them whenever they want without having to ask their mom again.
The app will provide Lisa with a list of places near her location that sell the required ingredients for the recipe. She will also be able to get directions from her location to the stores so she can buy the required ingredients and then be able to start making her dish once she gets back home.
Here is a concept video of how we expect this solution to fulfill the needs of our users.
Using the concept video and assumptions, we ran several user interviews and developed a lo-fi prototype in which we ran through with our testing users.
Results
This project began with ideation and storyboarding, and culminated in the creation of a functional app prototype.
Through interviews and discussions, we refined our initial ideas and direction. Low-fi prototyping and testing informed the development of a hi-fi prototype using Figma, which illustrated the app's flow. The resulting prototype offers a tested and verified solution, validated by feedback from multiple users within our target audience.
Takeaways
While we are currently satisfied with our app's prototype, we believe that it could be expanded in the future to include additional features that would allow users to interact with each other and share recipes. These features may include the ability to edit and/or make suggestions to other users' recipes, as well as the ability to share recipes via other social media platforms, such as Facebook Messenger and text messaging. As most of our team members are computer science majors with app development experience, the next step would be to code and implement the prototype so that it is fully functional. We are confident that we will be able to expand this project in the future.