Globowl

Solution

Globowl is an educational app that uses short video lessons to teach its users about different cultures through the lens of food and cuisine. The videos explain topics such as food-related vocabulary, customs, traditions and holidays, and more. Users are rewarded for completing lessons and quizzes by unlocking recipes they can try out themselves.

Key Features

Visuals

The app uses a mostly warm color palette that reflects a friendly and inviting feel. The shapes used in the backgrounds and illustrations were created to evoke different tastes, sounds and smells one might experience in the kitchen. Key concepts and words are visually highlighted to aid users in retaining what they’ve learned. The illustrations are playful, but still realistic enough to be recognizable.

Process

User Survey

In order to gain a better understanding of the user base, I conducted a survey for university students that asked them about how and where they grew up (North America or elsewhere). Participants were asked about what aspects of their culture they already had knowledge about and which ones they were most interested in as well as what was keeping them from learning more. I found that Food and Language were what participants were most interested in and the main obstacles listed were: a lack of motivation/laziness, coming from mixed backgrounds where only one side was favoured, feeling ashamed/bullied for their culture, and simply not knowing where to go to learn more.

Competitive Analysis

Next, I looked into apps and services already existed in this space and how they tackled the problem: I found that they were very experiential and more story-based. I also did some research on how adults learn best and found that they require lessons that are practical and relevant to their daily lives that they identify more with emotionally driven content, and that they enjoy being able to have some freedom to explore topics on their own.

User Personas

With the information I gathered from my research and my user survey, I was able to develop two user personas that reflected everything I had learned. My mentor put a strong emphasis on research and making target-centric decisions, so these personas were what I referred to throughout the design and ideation process.

Mindmapping & Ideation

I used Whimsical to create mindmaps while exploring different options for features and structures for the app. One of the things I decided early on was to focus on one aspect of culture (food). In this phase, I tried to think of lots of different ways in which I could apply what I knew about how adults learn and what features would facilitate that type of learning.

System Map

Deciding on the structure and organization of the app was one of the most challenging parts of the project. Even after this site map was completed, I ended up having to make adjustments while designing the app. However, the idea of having the Pantry, Cookbook, Events and Profile be the main sections stayed mostly the same.

Mockups

The sections that went through the most changes were Cook, Learn and Pantry. I had started out using tabs to separate sub-pages, but felt that they were a bit difficult to use for larger fingers. I thought the Lessons and Quizzes sections should be similar but still distinct so users wouldn’t confuse them. I also wanted to reduce the number of interactions it would take to get to view recipes, so the Cook homepage already has recipes ready to browse on top of categories to tap into. For the Pantry, a lot of the changes focused on emphasizing the illustrations of the ingredients and allowing users to better see the details of the illustrations.

Final Outcome & Takeaways

Throughout this process, I’ve learned how important it is to keep in mind the user personas when designing in order to make target-centric decisions. The research that I did before my ideation phase was really key to figuring out which features were most important and how they should be implemented. For example, I made sure to include the option to switch between lessons from different cultures since a lot of the people in my target audience came from mixed backgrounds.

Something that I‘d like to develop further is the events page: how RSVPing works, viewing the numbers of attendees at events, as well as how bonus recipes are redeemed after events/how to verify that someone has attended an event. I would also like to work more on the idea of a journal/photo album where users can store photos of the recipes they have attempted, and possibly share them and view others’ attempts.

The Figma prototype can be viewed here.

Special thanks to my RGD mentor, Miki Arai, for guiding me through this project!