Automated System
Overview
Our team created GroceryU, an app system that can maximize your benefit when doing grocery shopping in different aspects including cost, calories, nutrition, carbon footprint and other concerns based on different users' priority. This app also helps your grocery shopping and teaches you how to cook by providing different recipes. I came up with this idea of the system and focused on designing the user interface. Neil contributed task analysis and flow chart, and Tyler wrote about the motivation and naive user walkthrough.
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Motivation
If you’re a college student or young professional, living on a budget and crunched for time, you’ve probably been faced with the dilemma of whether or not it's cheaper for you to eat out or go grocery shopping and cook at home. One of the toughest parts of this dilemma is calculating how much cooking at home really costs on a per meal basis.
Save your time and money with GroceryU. GroceryU not only helps you track how much you’re spending on groceries for each meal but it will also help track which groceries you have left in your cabinet, recipes you can make with the remaining groceries, when it's time to restock and much much more.
Our motivation behind creating this app stemmed from the desire to better understand whether or not spending all of the time grocery shopping and meal prepping at home really does save money especially when half of all food produced in the US is thrown out. About $165 billion worth of food is thrown away each year and for the average American family, that can be up to $2,200 per household. With all of the new fast casual restaurants like Digg Inn, Sweet Green and Chipotle, it's fairly easy to eat healthy for under $12/meal.
In a recent study performed by Wellio, data showed that the average price of a meal delivered from a restaurant is $20.37, the cost of dinner made from a meal kit is $12.53, and a serving of a home cooked meal is just $4.31. However, many studies such as this fail to account for the value of our time or what is known as the time vs money dilemma.
The only issue here isn’t money but also time. Let's assume the average person lives 20 minutes from the grocery store and it takes them one hour at the grocery store to select of their groceries and then another 20 minutes to drive home. Once at home, it will take on average 20 minutes to unload the car and put all of the groceries away. According to a study performed by Forbes, the average person spends 2 hours and 8 minutes per day on meal preparation and cleanup. Thats a grand total of 986 minutes or roughly 16 hours a week spent cooking. If you were to apply the average hour rate of a US employee, $27.16 and multiply it by the time spent cooking, that’s a total cost of $434.56.
Let GroceryU help you put time and money back your day. Try our app today!
Task Analysis
This was a difficult system to design, for several reasons. We had elected to design an entire system, rather than a physical automation. We did this because we strongly believed in its concept, and in a way we all wished we had something like this. It cut to a central core of Human Factors, the goal of letting humans do what they are good at while letting machines and computers do what they are good at. In this case, we believed that a human would be good at cooking, doing complex varied tasks, and performing complex abstract thought, while a computer would be good at collecting data, organizing data, comparing data, and presenting human requested data. Our system was broken into 4 broad concept tasks, with a human and a machine playing important parts for each one.
Check out the full Task Analysis
Flow Chart
1. Make New Profile
2. Shopping For Ingredients
3. Cooking A Recipe
4. Making An After Recipe Report
UI / UX
Green color can represent the theme and goal of GroceryU - aim for a money-saving, organized and eco-friendly lifestyle.
This app has three main sections - Recipe, Scan, and Profile.
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Recipe choices
A specfic recipe
Scan the product
Profile
Product label information
Naive User Walkthrough
Meet Jorge
Jorge is a 25 year old, young working professional who works full time for a tech start-up in Cambridge, MA and attends night classes part-time at Boston University for his MBA. Jorge lives in a small apartment with his girlfriend Sophia who is a full time PhD student at MIT with a very busy schedule and spends many long nights in the lab.
Due to their busy schedules, Jorge and Sophia don’t get to spend much time together and the last thing they want to do is spend long hours cooking every day. They try their best to be responsible with their money so instead of eating out, they go grocery shopping each week and plan to prepare meals. They’re usually able to prepare meals for about half of the week before their schedules just get too busy, they decide to either have food delivered or pick it up on their way home and similar to many others, they end up throwing nearly half of their groceries away. .
One day at work while talking to some coworkers about this issue, Jorge hears about GroceryU. Jorge decides to try it out so he downloads the app. As he began to fill out the new user information he was impressed with the depth of questions he was required to answer. After entering his basic user profile information with his name, age and location, he filled out a brief survey about his environmental priorities in regard to carbon emissions, water use, nutrition and cost. The next part of the profile required him to input his meal preferences so he decided he should wait until Sophie got home before he filled out the rest.
Together, Jorge and Sophie fill out the meal preferences, cooking options and upload a couple of their favorite recipes. On Sunday, Sophie is busy at the lab so Jorge goes to the grocery store to pick up some groceries for the week using his new app. He opens up his app and selects Sophie’s favorite recipe, spaghetti with meatballs. The app is very user friendly and lists out the exact ingredients and amounts he must purchase. Jorge scans each item into the app as he places them in his cart so that by the time he gets home he’ll be ready to start cooking.
When he returns home, he unloads his groceries and opens up the GroceryU app. He carefully follows each step of the recipe, using the correct portion sizes. The app accurately records the amount of each ingredient remaining and will send notifications periodically to remind him they’re in the cabinet and need to be used up for they go bad. Jorge selects his recipe and confirms that he wants to cook it. The display shows him his list of ingredients and he retrieves them, and confirms that he has them. Next, the display shows him the list of cooking utensils he’ll need, which he then retrieves and confirms that he is ready to cook. The display shows him his first ingredient, which he confirms, weighs on the scale, pours out the amount needed, and then weighs it again. The scale compares the difference in weight, and is able to verify the amount used, as well as the amount left. He repeats these steps for each ingredient and then begins to cook. Once the food is done cooking, he attentively plates each dish for him and Sophie, lights a candle, pours two glasses of wine and waits for Sophie to get home.
Finally, after Jorge surprises Sophie with dinner and they finish the meal, he will return to the app and complete the post meal survey. Based on the priority summary he had previously filled out, GroceryU informed him that the meat from the recipe had used a large CO2 footprint and asked him if he would like to try some local meat next time. He answers yes and GroceryU updates his shopping list for next time. GroceryU then informs him that they meal cost $14 to make asked him to estimate how many meals he was able to prep out of it. Jorge selects 5 and is surprised to see that in total each of the 5 meals only cost him $2.80 to make.
Lastly, GroceryU notifies him that he only has 6 oz of pasta left and asks him if he wants more. He replies yes and then is promptly updates his shopping list. The remaining meat will spoil in 3 days so GroceryU asks him if we would like to check for other recipes. After he selects yes, he is offered several meal prep options decides to give Shepards Pie a try for something new. The extra ingredients are added to the shopping list and he is ready to go for the next meal.