UX strategy and design of a recipes platform with Nestlé products, planned in partnership with Google Brazil

My role: Managed a team of 3. Features planning. Prototyping and interface design.

The main feature was the use of voice recognition technology 🎙️ (Google Cloud Speech API) to control videos during recipe preparation.

In addition, it was necessary to organize Nestlé’s previous content, develop navigation, search, extra functionality for customers and ensure the responsive design of the portal.

A challenge of responsive design in this type of project is to guarantee the usability and access to all functionalities of a complex interface, regardless of the device where it is displayed

Interaction and iteration

At the beginning of the project, my role was to prototype the main functionalities. We had a lot of doubts how the recipe video player could be used easily both on a laptop and a smartphone.

My inspiration for this feature was the video game voice controlled interface solution 🎮

Recipe player interface with its main variations

With the prototype in hand, the next step would be to negotiate with the client the execution of a usability test 🧪 using the technology, as well as developing the remaining functionalities of the portal and structuring the visual language of the interaction elements.

Several functionalities were inserted in the project during its development, such as: shopping list, filters, scheduling and recipe recommendation and comments

Increased customer engagement was an expectation at the beginning of the project

Obstacles

The project was canceled ❌ by the client after a few months.

1. Scope Increase

On the one hand, the requested functionalities became complex over time, which led to a budget increase that made the project unfeasible.

2. Issues with core functionality

When preparing a recipe, the distance from the microphone made it difficult for this solution to succeed

The initial idea was for people to use the video player to prepare recipes without touching the device (since hands get dirty during preparation). For that, voice control was essential.

Without the possibility of carrying out initial research, we internally tested the ability of devices to identify the voice and recognize what the person using the portal said.

While more robust devices such as laptops were able to capture the voice and recognize commands correctly, smaller devices such as tablets and smartphones failed in this task, which made the recipe player technologically unfeasible.

Credits

The project was very interesting because Nestlé has an extensive base of video and text recipes using its products. The technology proposed by Google was also innovative at the time.

My role in this project was to prototype the main functionalities, negotiate research with the client and, after some time, manage a small team to prototype and iterate some suggested functionalities.