ROOMBEES - Sync calendars, suggest recipes, & organize chores
Meal planning app for roommates. Saves students time & money with shared calendars, ingredient-based recipes & chore coordination.
Role
UX Researcher
UX Designer
UI Designer
Timeline
2022 - 6 Weeks
(Sep’ 22 - Oct’ 22)
Project type
A concept-based academic project
Team
2 Product Designers
Overview
"Cramming for exams shouldn't mean sacrificing healthy eating."
RoomBees, a new planning app, tackles the struggles of college roommates. Unlike existing solutions, RoomBees integrates calendars for seamless scheduling, suggests budget-friendly recipes based on shared ingredients, and even helps keep chores and shopping lists organized – all in one place.
Team Goal
Make informed dietary choices and prioritize their well-being despite busy schedules and tight budgets
Simplifying meal planning, grocery shopping, and chore management.
Maintaining a healthy diet in shared living
Problem and Solution
A synopsis of the problem and solution
Making life easy for students
Dorm life often means unhealthy choices due to time crunches, tight budgets, and lack of roommate meal-planning coordination. Existing solutions fall short of shared living.
Feature 1: Calendar Integration
Users can easily create a group with their roommates and synchronize their calendars, which allows for more effective coordination of meal times and schedules.
Feature 2: Scan, Utilize, & Whip Up Delicious Meals
The scanner for ingredients, a section for using leftovers, and options for quick dishes and various cuisines make it easier for users to find recipes that suit their preferences and time constraints.
Feature 3: Chores Management
roommates stay organized by keeping track of daily chores, shopping lists, and notes.
Research & Analysis
Understanding & validating the problem
We initiated our research to comprehensively understand and validate the reasons behind the wastage. To achieve this goal, we employed a combination of quantitative and qualitative research techniques, including:
Fig: My roommate is preparing pizza loaded with cheese for brunch since it takes less than 5 mins for her to prepare it
Fig: My roommate binge eating oily food at 3 am and working on his assignments
Fig: My friend wasn’t comfortable taking their picture. But I have the evidence of shoppling bill with the date and time of her bill. This is when she was panicking about how did her bill exceed her planned grocery limit
Fig: The person sitting in the picture is someone who eats every day at Campus Center from chick-fil-a. She said there are no other healthier options on campus, there’s one but that’s expensive for her to buy and eat every day
Fig: My friend who is a student is cooking and working to manage her time well.
Fig: My friend was busy working on his assignments so he skipped his lunch
Survey Findings
To understand user behavior and attitudes, we crafted closed-ended questions. Here are the key insights:
Outcomes
72% students notice any changes in your body, health, or productivity when they missed meals.
Only 29% of students have 3 meals a day.
78% of the students prefer to have home cooked meals but only 47% do that so.
96 % of students buy groceries from supermarkets.
Empathy Mapping
The empathy map helped us to visualize Roommate's attitudes and behaviors and establish a deeper understanding of them.
Ideation
Affinity Mapping
Based on our brainstorming, Jamming, and mapping session and testing our ideas, we identified 6 major aspects on which we may focus and construct our application.
Ideas
Grocery
Delivery
Recipe Suggestions
Schedule Meal Planning
Scan Leftovers for Suggestions
Ready to
eat Meals
Would just become another social media app
Community Building
Lot of exsisting apps on this idea
User Flow
We created the user flow to map the user journey within the app and ascertain the most effective and efficient user interactions
Tracking your health and nutrition with personalized BMI and calorie monitoring.
Effortlessly plan meals around busy schedules with our calendar feature.
Revolutionize your meal planning - scan and discover new recipes
Recipes
Profile
Calender
Helps to Manage household chores and bills easily
Home
Heuristic Outcomes
-
Adding Canvas calendar option for syncing schedule
-
User is shown an error message when can’t find recipe combinations with selected leftovers
-
Remove wrongly scanned raw ingredients or add undetected items
-
Possible solution is to give users an option to leave the group whenever they choose to.
-
Missed include the Title Field when scheduling chores instead of just meals.
Final Designs
Recipe's Screen
Favorite any recipe so you can revisit it again
Ingredient scanner, helps making it easier for users to find recipes that suit their preferences and time constraints
Suggests delicious recipes you can make using your leftover ingredients, preventing them from spoiling and saving you money.
Options to explore different cuisine if craving for something new!
Quick Recipe suggestions which are easy to make with readily available ingredients at home
-
Prototype how Ingredients scanner works
-
Prototype how Use Up Leftover works
Group Calender
Track of free time for all your roommates in one calendar.
Users can choose the date from here
Users can schedule meal prep, grocery shopping, and other chores by clicking the blue area or the box below
Time Scale is shown here
-
Group creation the calendar integration Prototype
-
Scheduling meal Prep Prototype
Thinking Business
Profitability of our application
We have received a valid concern regarding our application's profitability, considering the absence of any subscriptions or plans. However, we are currently exploring alternative options to generate revenue that would not require our users to pay any charges. As our application is designed to enhance students' convenience and time and money management, we believe it would be unfair to impose fees on them.
Key Learnings
My learnings after leading the project
-
Applied Academic Knowledge: Executed project during master's studies, applying academic knowledge to real-world scenarios.
-
End-to-End Design Process: This comprehensive experience enhanced skills in executing end-to-end design projects.
-
Balancing Research and Implementation: Managed research alongside practical design aspects, highlighting the importance of balancing theory with hands-on application.