For the last few weeks, I worked on an iOS app for the Oicy team's demo at Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. The scope of this app and its development timetable was to create a demo application to showcase the future capabilities of Oicy service.
Smart Kitchen Summit Japan is an annual 2-day conference. There is a single track of talks along with booths in the main hall for exhibitors. The general theme of the conference is the future of food.
A special team was assembled from the Smart Kitchen team members to organize Cookpad's presence at the conference. One requirement was a demo to present during the conference at the Cookpad booth. The goal of the demo was to show the future capabilities of Cookpad, and show a novel use of smart devices to improve everyday cooking.
The result of a few weeks of heavy ideation and iteration was the outline of a demo. The use case we decided to target was 工夫 (Kufu): the idea that you can improve a recipe over time by cooking it and making small, creative changes during each cooking session. Although it's certainly possible to accomplish this without smart devices, the combination of smart devices, an app and a service can alleviate much of the manual processes of documenting the changes you make to a recipe, freeing up your attention to use on the creative parts of cooking. Every recipe experiments or decisions to create your perfect recipe (from parent recipe) gets documented and sets a record of successful recipes in your repertoire.
The model objects used in the app, Recipe and Session, were hardcoded into the app at compile time. Most apps either have user generated content that requires more considerations for layout and validation. Overall this made development much simpler.
The demo was performed at Cookpad's booth. The dramatic setup was between two Smart Kitchen team members:
A chef and a demo app operator and the MC giving the audience an explanation of chef's process.
Four smart devices were used during the demo:
1. OiCy Taste - condiment dispenser (soy sauce, mirin, etc.)
2. OiCy Water - variable hardness water dispenser
3. OiCy Omega - IH cooktop
4. Sharp Healsio - microwave oven
In order to realize the vision of this demo, we decided on the following interaction features:
• A new special section of the Cookpad iOS app is mocked where the recipes you've cooked are shown in a section called "My Repertoire".
• User opens a recipe and find the last cooking session with documented details on changes made.
• Once the recipe is opened, the device settings instructions are automatically sent to devices. Certain ingredients and steps that are associated with smart devices are automatically programmed into the smart devices as soon as you open a recipe.
• Making changes to the settings of a smart device will record those changes alongside the session, creating a history of changes over time.
• Next time when user open the app, the last session is highlighted in Repertoire. Time-varying data like the power level of an IH stove is recorded and displayed in a graph.
• User can add a note to a session with ideas of what went well or what could be changed next time.
• All the sessions – a date and time you've cooked a recipe – can be browsed to quickly grasp how a recipe has changed over time.
• User can mark a session as a "favourite" to indicate that the session resulted in a great final dish.
Demo 1 (changing microwave & IH)
Demo 2 (changing water, soy sauce, mirin sauce)
The initial request was for me to finish the app in the 4 days between the designs being finalized and the first rehearsals starting. Multiple sessions with the product manager made us understand his vision of the demo, simplified with the time feasibility and focusing on core interactions. I immediately ideated with quick sketches and narrated the workflow. With a back and forth, the workflow was signed off to create a hi-fi mocks.
I made this timeline work by working in tandem with iOS Dev for about 3 days while I was still designing and he was in-parallel developing the base architecture. The stage team was using a Figma prototype for the first day of demo rehearsal instead of the real app. In the end, active development was about 10 days, including all the required changes.
The fact that there were only two flows made the app much easier to regression test. It also made it easier to match my programmatic layouts to the designs in Figma. I tried to prioritise my own work so that the app could be used and evaluated as soon as possible, while pushing the details or more time consuming tasks to the end of the development schedule.
In the past, I've either worked on apps that were English-only, or had many localisations.
The demo app was different in that it was not localised, but it was Japanese language-only. For me, has been a bit more challenging because I don't immediately recognise when the copy is incorrect or looks strange, including date formats or other localisation-specific elements I'm not used to. I can't confidently write my own copy if I need to, or make certain design decisions on the fly.
The design phase required much more input from the product manager and subject matter experts, especially in the details of the design that would usually be filled in transparently by the designer or developer.