Meal Planning for Busy Families
Overview: Working with a group of 2 other graduate students, I helped perform ethnographic research and concept validation to help families with two working parents plan meals.
Problem: By 4:00p on a given day, 40% of U.S. consumers do not know what they will eat for dinner. Meal planing for busy families is often neglected, and parents often feel guilt and stress as a result.
Solution: We conducted research to understand how busy families plan meals to inform the design of assistive technology.
January 2008 – May 2008
Team of 3
- Final Deliverables:
- Design Concept Report
- User Research Report, including models and diagrams
- Personas
- During the project, I...
- Interviewed 3 families, comprehensively covering their actions and attitudes towards meals.
- Conducted 3 ethnographic studies of families in the grocery store.
- Conducted 3 ethnographic studies of families preparing and eating dinner.
- Administered and analyzed cultural probes (meal diaries) from several families.
- Helped create models synthesizing user research findings.