Problem Space

It all started with a lack of time and thyme.

It's the holiday season, which also means Black Friday and Boxing Day sales. I snagged some heavily discounted HelloFresh boxes, and while I had a pretty good experience with them, I couldn't help but see ways they could be improved.

The general opinion for these meal kits is that they do indeed cost more than if you were to shop on your own. However, many subscribe anyways, citing convenience, and in particular, that they consider the extra cost to be a "tuition fee".

The most friction I had when throughout the Hello Fresh experience was definitely following their text-based recipes.

So: HMW enhance the cooking experience with interactive recipes?

Field Research

Current Experience: How Do People Use A HelloFresh recipe?

I started with doing auto-ethnography and field research to analyze how people normally cook with recipes. A HelloFresh recipe comes in the form of an A4 cardstock, double-sided. I like the size and the compactness!

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/28b1c59f-93be-491c-9ec7-3e270282dcae/hf1.png

Anatomy of a recipe card:

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/8ea9c578-00bb-4234-8767-12b34c08d717/hf2.png

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/945114f7-3d2c-480b-b68d-6a8ee7c03895/Untitled.png

The recipe cards are fairly straightforward. The amount of images and standard layout make it easy to transform one into a tracked image, and the logo is complex enough to be used as well.

Following the recipe, I had three main concerns:

  1. Instructions were sometimes unclear, confusing, or too brief to be actionable. (eg. "Cut chicken parallel" what does this mean??? or, like I said, "Strip thyme." I'm sorry I'm asian I've never cooked with thyme in my life."
  2. I didn't know WHY I was asked to do a certain thing. This really detracted from the learning experience, since I wouldn't be able to apply the process to other recipes.
  3. Within the large block of text, I sometimes missed specific ingredients.

From looking at product reviews on third party websites, and observing my sister's cooking process as well, I saw similar concerns. Given more time, I would follow up with a survey and some interviews or more field research. Based on the process-heavy research needed for cooking, I would lean heavily towards field research.