Chefmade
App & Web
30 Aug – 21 Dec 2021
In the autumn semester of 2021, I had an internship at the company Chefmade. At Chefmade, I had the role of UX designer, where my assignment included trying to solve the company's problems regarding handling tasks related to ordering, processing and execution of orders. This included mapping existing processes, devising and designing new, more agile, automated and scalable processes, as well as designing mockups, wireframes, flow charts and prototypes, with a focus on ensuring a better user experience for customers and restaurants. Chefmade is a start-up company which has an online platform where customers can book chefs from restaurants, to go out to their private homes and cook for their events.
Process
I was fully in charge of what I was doing and how I was doing it, so I initially chose to examine the company's processes, to form a basic understanding of the company's service, as well as how the various stakeholders interacted. For this two processes were identified, one for customers who placed an order through the “get an offer” button without specifying a menu or restaurant, and the other for customers who make requests for specific menus or restaurants. I mapped the two processes on a flow chart, in order to visualise the processes and gain an overview of them.
Based on the understanding I gained from the flow charts, I chose to conduct interviews with potential Chefmade customers, to investigate their use of Chefmade, as well as identify the areas of the user interface that could be improved. Interviews were conducted with four people who had not used Chefmade before. It was not possible to get in touch with people who had tried Chefmade before. An affinity diagram was constructed to gain an insight into the collected empirical data through the thematisation of interview notes.
Based on the results of the affinity diagram, I started exploring different possible concepts and designs through sketches. In this part of the process, I focused on making as many different design proposals as possible, to avoid design fixation, and to thoroughly explore possibilities. During this proces I also considered the flow charts, so that I was always aware of how a possible concept would impact the workflow of Chefmade.
The concepts and designs were assessed on the basis of their impact on Chefmades work processes, as well as what value they would give to the users and the company. The best concepts and designs were transformed into a complete interface design, which was represented through a wireframe made in Adobe XD. In addition, a design language was created, in order to create structure on Chefmades design and the use thereof.
Following this I changed my focus and started developing an application intended for the restaurants, which would allow them to manage orders and see statistics of their business at Chefmade. This application was developed in Flutter for Android and iOS and followed the design language I had previously created.
Design
The aesthetics of the interfaces I designed had to be kept elegant and needed an almost luxurious expression, in order to reflect that Chefmade was a great service that was worth the costs. For this purpose titles were chosen to be written with a serif typography, whereas body text was written with a sans typography. Serif typography generally has an elegant look but it is not suitable for body text on screens, and so a sans typography was needed for that.
The colours were kept simple where a light reddish colour was used as the background color, and the rest was dominated by white and accent colours that would indicate the status of various elements in the interface. Primary buttons were designed to be heavy and to contrast with the rest of the interface, since these should represent the call-to-action buttons and were important for the company and for gaining customers. Based on this primary buttons were completely black with white text and had a good amount of padding.
For the application a focus was added on making the structure and navigation native to each operating system, so that the iOS application would feel and act like an iOS application, and the Android application would feel and act as an Android application. This focus was important for the user friendliness of the application, as well making the application and Chefmade seem professional and to have attention to details.
Gallery
This section provides images related to this project, such as sketches, wireframes, screenshots and similar. Click on an image to view the full size.