Overview
Five-Minute Recipes is an Alexa skill which allows busy users to select from among several options for quick meals, then follow step-by-step directions to prepare the selected meal.
Role: Lead UX/VUI designer (individual project)
Timeline: Sep 2018
The Problem
These days, people are too busy to cook. There are more and more people who live alone and they tend to choose eating hamburgers or unhealthy food from outside. Even they try to cook and search recipes on their smartphone, it is not easy to follow instructions with their dirty hand during cooking.
But now we have a new approach, voice user interface.
One of the biggest difference between UI and VUI is we need to care more about when and in which situation they use the voice user interface.
Cooking is one of the most suitable for VUI because they can listen and speak but their hands are not free when they are cooking.
So I decided to make an Alexa skill to allow busy users to search recipes which are done in 5 or 10 minutes.
Personas
I made a user persona, Satoshi. He is a busy single and wants to quit eating out to become healthy. He likes new technology and uses Amazon Echo for asking weather forecast and order bottled water and beer.
Also, I made system persona, Casey to identify the voice user interface. She is a master of effective and healthy cooking.
User Stories
I defined Satoshi's needs and then user stories to determine which features the skill should offer. This helped me to define intents and basic functions as well.
User Stories
- As a busy worker, I want to cook healthy and light meals quickly after coming back home at midnight so that I don't become fat.
- As a picky eater, I want to search recipes with exceptional words so that I can avoid ingredients which I hate.
- As a health freak, I want to know how to cook the same recipes in a healthier way (e.g using less oil without losing good taste) so that I can eat healthier food.
User Flows
With the user stories, I made sample dialogs and then user flows to map out how all the intents in a skill are related to one another.
User flows for ChooseTypeIntent
Voice Scripts
I also began working on the script. I listed all possible utterances and Casey's reply for all intents.
Usability Test
With the voice scripts, I conducted usability test to determine the most important features and functionality. I asked the participants to do the following scenarios.
[ Scenario 1 ]
You came back from your office at 10 pm and you get very tired. You decided to cook dinner in a short time. Ask Alexa to help you find recipes.
[ Scenario 2 ]
You want to cook lunch. Find recipes with Five Minute Recipe and follow the instruction.
[ Scenario 3 ]
You want to cook breakfast. You get a recipe, but you want to know another recipe.
Then I got 4 main issues and considered suggested changes.
Issue 1: Users started speaking when Alexa was still explaining (severity: low)
[ Suggested Change ]
Change the order of words like the following example.
(Before) “You can ask me to repeat the instructions or say ‘next’ to hear the next line of instructions.”
(After) “You can ask me to repeat the instructions or if you want to hear the next line of instructions, say ‘next’.”
Issue 2: Allowing only saying “yes” or “no” makes users irritated (severity: low)
[ Suggested Change ]
Allow users to answer with slots as well if the expected slot values are not many.
Issue 3: Users uses unexpected utterances (severity: high)
[ Suggested Change ]
Add utterances which users used and sounds common.
Issue 4: Weak help messages (severity: medium)
[ Suggested Change ]
Provide customer help message as much as possible to explain what users can do after the specific questions or instructions.
