Problem Statement

Time-crunched teens and college students are often too busy to eat healthy. How might we make eating healthy more interesting and engaging? Thyme is designed to solve that problem as a cooking app that offers quick and easy to follow recipes focused on balance and nutrition without leaning into dieting and food-shaming culture. 

Design Process

I started with a competitive audit where I discovered that, aside from Tasty, there weren’t any healthy cooking apps targeting teens and young adults. I did additional user research to understand what features provide a positive user experience for teens and used that to develop user personas and map user journeys that helped guide paper and digital wireframes and lo-fi prototypes, and later a responsive website. 

Video tutorials combined with simplified recipe captions were a key design focus to help users better visualize recipe steps and techniques, while also being more engaging than just reading a block of recipe text.

Additionally, there was a focus on using text that would speak to teens and young adults without sounding disingenuous. 

A bright and bold color palette was used to create an energizing and fun design.

Testing & Improvements

After usability testing, I used the feedback to improve UX and UI functionality and implemented the following changes: 

• Once a recipe was viewed, there was no way of navigating back. In addition to a top navigation bar, I added a back button to let users return to a previous screen. 

• Some users found CTA navigation labels confusing, for example “Explore” and “My Recipes.” I changed the labels to be “Home” and “My Recipe Book” to clarify each page’s purpose. 

• There was also confusion around the lack of consistency, as both rectangle and square thumbnails were used to represent videos. For better consistency, I stuck to the rectangle thumbnail.

Results & Reflections

Challenges included creating a design that would incorporate aspects from existing apps that teens enjoy, such as Buzzfeed and TikTok, while retaining a unique vision and purpose and drafting interface and microcopy that teens would recognize without coming across as pandering. It was much more difficult than I initially thought, as Gen Z is all about authenticity. Another consideration was figuring out how to provide a pared back web experience that has enough of the app experience while still directing users to the app.