Your assistant chef in the kitchen. Reads you a recipe as you cook, assists in meal planning for the week, adds items to your shopping list and will even purchase them for you via Amazon shopping.
Objective:
The purpose of this skill is to allow users to be able to choose from a list of recipes for quick meals and snacks, and follow step by step instructions to prepare the chosen meal.
Who?
Anyone who is interested in quick meal preparation, who wishes recipe inspiration and who is comfortable browsing and using voice technology.
What?
A digital recipe book of short recipes with preparation directions, available as an Alexa skill.
When?
Your users will use this app to prepare small meals or snacks throughout the day.
Where?
Your users will use this app to prepare small meals or snacks throughout the day.
Why?
To help your users decide on and prepare quick, simple meals.
User Stories
To get a better idea of what the users goals with the the Sous Chef skill are, I had to create several user stories with each feature.
There were five features all together I believe the Alexa skill can benefit the user.
Feature 1: Provide recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks
Feature 2: Allow the user to choose their preferred meal.
Feature 3: Provide an adequate number of meal choices for the user to get value from the app.
Feature 4: Be able to use the recipe while cooking.
Feature 5: Picks recipe at random.
Describe your image
Describe your image
Story Board
As a part of discovering the pain points of using a regular recipe book verse an auditory recipe application I created a story board to help visualize what the user experiences. Scroll through below to see the full story board.
Personas
As a user experience designer focused in voice interface design, I have to think on behalf of both the user, and making sure to cater the AI's persona to the user's needs and preferences.
The first persona shown below, is Annabelle. The persona of the cooking assistant or the "Sous Chef", she responds to both. Annabelle is married with children and lives in the French country side. She is family oriented and skillful in the kitchen in that she loves to travel, and while at it, learn the ins and outs of a kitchen in other cultures. She is patient, understanding and caring.
The second persona shown is Grace. she is our user persona. A newlywed, social butterfly who loves to host. She is constantly on a self improvement streak, and being newly wed and not the best cook, is hoping to improve that trait so her husband doesn't have to take over in the kitchen.
User Flows for Voice Design
Grouping together the common intents between all the different user stories allowed me to focus on the intents which everyone seemed to be interested in, and lay out a flow chart of how exactly a user would go about accessing that intent or feature.
There are certain intents that are a must, and a requirement when designing for Alexa:
HelpIntent: provides a helpful message to the user.
CancelIntent: exits from a step within a skill.
StopIntent: exits the skill.
Other Intents required for the case study:
ChooseTypeIntent: lets a user choose what type of meal they'd like to make.
InstructionsIntent: provides the recipe instructions
NextStepIntent: goes to the next step in a recipe
YesIntent: allows a user to confirm a choice.
NoIntent: allows a user to disconfirm a choice.
Click on chart to open pdf and get a better look.
View more voice charts for other Sous Chef features.
Sample Dialogs
I created sample dialogs which focus around a user story catering to each feature listed.
User Story:
As a person on the go, I want access to recipes for all types of meals so that I can meal prep at the start of the week.
User
"Alexa, Open Sous Chef"
User
"I am planning my recipes for the week"
Sous Chef
"Hello Chef, What are we making today?"
User
"No"
User
"Yes, please."
User
"Yes."
Sous Chef
"I can help with that. Do you know what you want to make?"
Sous Chef
"Would you like me to make suggestions based off your previous choices?"
"Great. This recipe requires, spaghetti noodles, ricotta cheese, parmesan cheese, baby spinach, whole lemon, extra virgin olive oil. garlic clove, salt and pepper. Do you want to get started?"
Sous Chef
Sous Chef
"I found a recipe based off the recent pasta recipe you chose, lemon ricotta pasta. Would you like to hear the ingredients?"
"No. Please add the ingredients to my cart
in Amazon."
User
"Spaghetti noodles, ricotta cheese, parmesan cheese, baby spinach, whole lemon, extra virgin olive oil. garlic clove, salt and pepper. Have been added to your cart in Amazon."
Sous Chef
(alt 3) Bonjour Chef! Let's get cooking. What are we going to cook?
(alt 1) "Welcome Back Chef. What can I assist you with today?"
View all other sample dialogs here
Novice, Prompt and Tapered
Overall, as the speech designer, my goal is to have the smoothest transition between the AI (in this case Alexa) and the user while making sure to acknowledge my AI is still a machine. People love when technology is advanced, and can do all the cool tricks, but they do not love it to be too advanced for the fear of "robots taking over" is a real subconscious trigger. Making it too realistic will almost ensure people do not use the product.
Personalizing a skill with memory, makes it more memorable (yeah see what I did there) for the user. Meaning that if we place a memory like the user's name in there, they are going to feel more inclined to uses the product since it remembers who they are.
Below I have laid out the different variations of greetings, interactions or prompts a user can expect upon first interacting with the AI Sous Chef upon opening.
Reminder:
Novice= Orient new users to the basic functionalities of your app, skill or feature.
Tapered= Ensures power or dedicated users don't get annoyed with too much information they don't actually need anymore.
Prompt= Core of the conversational interaction.
Novice
"Hi, I'm Annabelle. Your sous chef. I'm here to assist you with cooking and planning your recipes for the week. I have plenty of recipes to choose from and can help you organize your meals and shopping! When you know what kind of recipe you want, just say "Sous Chef, find me a recipe for" and give me the name, or type of recipe you are looking for.
Prompt
"Welcome back! How was the recipe {recipename}? Do you want to save it to your favorite list for future use?
Tapered
"Okay. I'll see what I can find. How was the last recipe?"
View more prompts for Sous Chef here.
And... we test!
I interviewed five people all different variations of users of voice interactions because I wanted to make sure that this skill is functional to the user no matter their skill level. I programmed the test to only respond to a quick pancake recipe. We ate a lot of pancakes this week.
Script for Usability Testing
Results & Analysis
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Finalized Sous Chef Script
Opening
Sous
Chef
Prompts and Utterances
Choose Type Intent Prompts and Utterances
Help Intent Prompts and Utterances
Instruction Intent Prompts and Utterances
Recipe Intent Prompts and Utterances