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EZ Chef: An Alexa skill for busy moms
Quick and nutritious recipes to keep kids focused in school and save moms time.
Problem:
Parents have extremely busy lives these days. Jobs, self-care, friends and raising a family all come with their own fair share of challenges. Parents want their kids to eat healthy and receive the vitamins and nutrients necessary for growth, but managing their meals along with managing their own lives is difficult. Is there a way to help parents cook quick and nutritious meals and snacks for their kids through a voice interface?
Solution:
A recipe skill for Amazon Alexa that helps busy moms create quick and healthy breakfasts, snacks and lunches to pack for their kids and provides some humor to relieve boredom and stress.
Key Learnings:
I found the project equally fascinating as challenging. I relished the challenge of designing for the ears and mouth instead of the eyes, and creating an experience that wouldn't waste the user's time or be too taxing on their memory. This project really taught be how to strip a design down to the essentials and structure the information architecture in a way that makes logical conversational sense.
Tools:
Alexa Development Console, AWS Lambda, Node.js, Miro, Microsoft Excel
Team:
Conversational Designer (self) and 1 Product Manager
Time:
2 weeks
Problem space: I wanted to focus on South Asian housewives by designing a voice interface that offered cultural recipes.
I've seen first-hand how busy the lives of Indian women are, being responsible for raising children, managing all aspects of the home, and creating time for themselves.
Meet Kaveri: Kaveri wants to make quick and healthy breakfasts, lunches and snacks from her culture to keep her kids energized and focused in school, and wants to create more time for herself.
She also gets bored at home, so talking with an entertaining voice interface would lighten her life a bit.
Meet your EZ Chef, Maya: Maya is a family-friendly, playful and empathetic system that will help Kaveri achieve her day-to-day goals, while providing some amusement.
I felt it necessary for the systems persona to provide Kaveri with some entertainment and support, otherwise she would be bored at home everyday doing all her chores. Maya's calm demeanor would also lessen Kaveri's stress. While the first iteration of this skill has Alexa’s voice, I created this system persona to guide my prompt writing to then develop further with a team of Engineers.
Browsing hundreds of recipes through a voice interface is impractical. Instead, Kaveri should be able to search recipes by ingredient, cuisine or meal type to find what she wants.
I decided to include this architectural flow for Kaveri because research that I conducted of food blogs and Amazon Alexa's FindRestaurantIntent all categorize in a similar way. This is how my users will most likely search for recipes, thus making their lives easier.
Users need to see things to believe them. A photo of the recipe would give Kaveri more confidence by showing her what the final product should look like. How could I incorporate a multimodal interface with the Echo Dot?
I thought that sending the recipe to Kaveri's phone for further instructions could be a way to solve this issue. This became one of my main focal points of the Wizard of Oz testing I conducted later on.
When writing out sample dialogs, I realized listing ingredients and equipment would be taxing on Kaveri's memory.
The following represents Kaveri's total interaction with the system, hitting all of the user flows addressed:
If Kaveri isn't picky about the recipe and just wants it to be healthy, it would save her giving her 3 recipe options rightaway.
Sitting through a recipe only to later find out she doesn't have the ingredients would be a huge waste of time for Kaveri.
I chose to include this functionality to help Kaveri reduce the number of errors she makes.
I chose to include this because nutritional facts are a dealbreaker for modern moms trying to give their kids the best. I included saturated fat instead of total fat, because it seems to be the matter more to health-conscious people, in my experience.
Listing the quantities before starting the recipe helps users keep everything ready, instead of scrambling in real-time, potentially falling behind on the instructions. The humor helps Kaveri destress.
VIEW FULL SAMPLE DIALOGS HERE.
I created a system diagram to have a visual of the interactions Kaveri would have with the interface.
A closer look:
Here you can see how the flow of the system sending Kaveri the recipe to her phone operates within the larger system architecture
The main challenge with creating the voice script was doing it "correctly."
I learned that every design team does voice scripts differently and the most important thing is to remain consistent. If I was working with an Engineer, they would need to understand what utterances would elicit certain system prompts as well as understand the system's language and humor.
VIEW FULL VOICE SCRIPT HERE.
Through conducting Wizard of Oz tests, I discovered that users thought it took too long to access recipes they wanted and they didn't know how to skip recipe steps.
EZ Chef also didn't give out nutritional information for every meal, depending on which route Kaveri took to receive a recipe. Moreover, total sugar wasn't included in the nutrition facts, which health-conscious users want to know.
My solution: asking Kaveri if she would like to access nutritional information and filter by cuisine and ingredient, instead of assuming she wanted to, in order to not waste her time. I also altered the script to include a brief onboarding for new users, in which EZ Chef tells them how to skip and go back when listening to the recipe steps.
Kaveri is happy with the new flow. She can access recipes in half the time!
Next steps: I would love to get the skill developed further, but I would also want to learn how to design for existing voice systems so that they can be more inclusive of Indian English accented users, thus making it possible for third-party skills like EZ Chef to be inclusive as well.
Thank you for reading!
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