UX Research

UX Researcher

2022

I worked on a team of four to design Boxtie; a recipe box exchange service crafted for those of mixed cultural identity. Its goal is to help users develop a personal connection to cultures through peer-to-peer recipe & story exchange.

Part I

For me, this project resonated deeply; being half-Filipino & half-White American, I've wrestled with the cultural dissonance experienced by those growing up in a mixed race family.

The team felt that it was an important and worthy space to explore, and so we hypothesized that our initial target user group would be of mixed ethnicity and proposed that food could somehow be a valuable intervention medium.

To gain a more informed & nuanced understanding, we conducted two rounds of literature review surrounding the phenomenon of acculturation.

Societal pressures of the past have resulted in suppressed expressions of immigrant culture within the U.S. Younger generations may hold a diminished sense of ethnic identity.

However, we are confident that younger generations will be able to rediscover heritage through modern technology, with an increased global interconnectedness that has never been seen before by generations-past.

Immigrant ancestry

This population experiences the effects of fractured cultural identity more acutely.

Multifaceted identity

This population has many cultural influences including upbringing, family, food, place, relationships, and lived experience.

Varying cultural comfort

This population feels as if they don't fully belong within any of their cultural backgrounds.

Cooking as expression

This population considers cooking to be an act of self expression.

Part II

After our secondary research, the next step in our process was to deepen our understanding by conducting primary research with the target user group.

Survey

A survey consisting of questions related to cultural & self identity was conducted in order to establish a sample size, assess the prevalence of cultural disconnect, assess how strongly the user group views food as it relates to identity, and recruit participants who best match our user group definition for further research.

The survey was disseminated through social media. A total of 36 recorded responses were received.

Semi-Structured Interviews

A total of 3 survey respondents were recruited as participants and interviewed for approximately 30 minutes per session. During which, scripted questions were posed to participants within the following categories: cultural background, connection to heritage, and self identity.

Interviews were recorded and transcribed with participants’ permission.

The team transcribed and analyzed each session in order to establish a code book consisting of recurring themes related to culture, personal identity, and food. Once all transcripts were coded, the team then analyzed the prevalence and patterns of certain codes and began to draw insights.

Overview

Our analysis of all the data collected produced 10 findings in total. Below are the seven-most prevalent.

RF-1

Cultural identity is formed by factors beyond ethno-cultural background

RF-4

Bridge or island: multicultural people vary greatly in their comfortability with their identity in the intersection of cultures

RF-5

Growing up in an area where the dominant culture differs from one’s own can lead to feelings of rejection/embarrassment of one’s culture

With our research findings drawn, it was important to visualize how these means of cultural connection-making manifest. Task flows were crafted to illustrate the two most-common pathways.

Ethnicity, race, and nationality are traditionally thought to be the source of culture, but it has been shown that food, friends, and the places that one has lived contribute significantly to one's cultural identity. From just this small sample size, it was clear that our user group has a broad range of deeply meaningful stories to tell.

The team began to refine its understanding of our findings into various functional and nonfunctional requirements that an intervention would need to meet in order to successfully address the target user group’s goals. In total, 3 functional requirements and 4 nonfunctional requirements were defined. For brevity, the following are the functional and nonfunctional requirements most strongly associated with our findings.

Functional (FR) & Nonfunctional (NR)

FR-3: Accurately represent the user’s identity, along all cultural dimensions

NR-3: Preserve the stories and context of fusion and family-tradition foods

Part III

Brainstorming

Members used drawings, jottings, and conversation to ideate on design concepts. Ideas did not go into specific detail, but instead gestured to potential requirements, outcomes, and metaphors.

Crazy 8’s

Two rounds of Crazy 8’s were conducted. Sketches were imported into a digital whiteboard and were synthesized into 10 distinct design concepts.

The team brainstormed how each concept could have the most potential for success in terms of meeting our design requirements, and how each could develop further into a coherent user narrative. The team also noted which concepts were the most exciting to pursue further.

Through storyboarding, our top concept emerged: Boxtie was chosen as the design that had the greatest potential to help our user group meet their goals in self-development and cultural exchange in regards to their complex, multicultural identities.

Rather than designing a digital product, Boxtie was designed as a service geared towards accommodating users' diverse self-development and cultural exchange goals by supplying them with monthly boxes with information on holidays, traditional & fusion foods, trends, and more. Our users can obtain in-depth knowledge about their preferred culture which fulfills the FR-1: Facilitate cultural exchange requirement.

Boxes provide instructions and stories related to recipes, which meets the FR-2: Promote/elevate fusion foods as authentic expressions of culture and the NR-1: Promote self-reflection and active self-development requirements. The service provides options to choose which cultures users would like to connect with each month, meeting the FR-3: Accurately represent the user’s identity, along all dimensions requirement.

Strengths

The strength of this design concept is that it is not just a digital application but a tangible representation of culture that allows the user to learn and experience it in a multi-sensory way. This would make learning more immersive and work as a method of ongoing learning, rather than just a one-time event.

Weaknesses

One potential weakness is the service’s ability to manage shipping logistics. All box contents would be sourced by the service for quality control and food safety. This would be a challenging aspect to overcome since it requires a complex supply chain infrastructure.

Part IV

The next phase of our process was to build out a functional prototype of the end-user experience to undergo further evaluation. The prototype sought to test the onboarding experience of the service along with a handful of other features supplemental to the physical box experience. This forced discussion about the concept’s low level design details.

In order to present a coherent narrative during prototype evaluation, we created a user persona based on our research and used it to guide prototype pathing and interaction decisions.

Onboarding: Signing up for Boxtie

When Farah first downloads Boxtie, she is presented with a series of introductory slides which explain what Boxtie is and its three core features: creating a cultural profile, exchanging boxes with others, and experiencing the cuisine and stories of others.

Requirements Addressed

Our onboarding process, and the cultural profile it creates, address our design requirement FR-3: Accurately represent the user’s identity along all dimensions. Our onboarding goes beyond simply asking for one’s ethnocultural background by asking about the places that have had a significant impact on a user’s cultural identity and other cultures they have an interest in.

Create a box for another user

Farah navigates to the “Boxes” tab, where she can see the status of her current box, select the option to exchange boxes, and see her favorite boxes and past boxes. Our prototype shows a special event, March Match-Up, in which Farah will create a box to send to a mystery match-up partner.

For the event, Boxtie presents Farah with a range of holidays and festivals that occur in March, as well as the option to search for others. She decides to make her box about Nowruz, the Persian New Year, and includes her recipe for Nan-e Nokhodchi from her existing recipe. Farah adds ingredients, stickers, a recipe printout to the box, and records a voice memo to accompany the box. After a few aesthetic changes to the box, Farah reviews and submits her entry.

Farah is matched up with Nanaia, based on their shared cultural overlaps. Nanaia, a New Zealander of Maori descent, has lived in India for a significant amount of time. For the March Match-Up, Nanaia has created a Rēwena Parāoa Recipe Box for Farah to receive.

Requirements Addressed

This flow fulfills our design requirement: FR-1: Facilitate cultural exchange between individuals. The box exchange process is inherently an exchange between individuals in which two users are paired. Both individuals then receive a more personal cultural connection experience and can learn about a particular culture directly, from a more nuanced and representative perspective.

Recipes: Sharing your personal fusion recipe & its story

Farah wants to share her personal recipe for Nan-e Nokhodchi, along with her memories of the dish. To upload this recipe and its corresponding story, Farah navigates to the “Recipes” tab. There, she is guided through the recipe creation process. Farah is asked to share her story of her Nan-e Nokhodchi and why it's important to her. She can add story flourishes to individual steps throughout the process such as: “Coconut is not traditional in this recipe, but growing up in India, we always added a little coconut with the pistachios!”.

She finalizes the recipe and now “Farah’s Nan-e Nokhodchi” is an available recipe and story on the platform.

Requirements Addressed

This flow addresses our design requirement: FR-2: Promote/elevate personal fusion foods as authentic expressions of culture. Users’ recipes are expressions of their unique cultural identity and experience. Rather than having users categorize their recipe into binary labels such as “traditional” or “fusion”, the recipe is simply named after the author, representing that the recipe’s proximity to tradition is not what makes it valuable and it is instead valuable because it is authentic to the user.

Privacy: Specifying permissions for sharing recipes and identity

When finalizing the recipe, Farah is presented with the privacy settings for her recipes. Here she chooses if she wants the recipe to be visible to all users, users with overlaps with her cultural profile, her friends, or to only herself.

If she chooses to publish publicly or with users with overlaps in cultural profile, Farah has the option to have her name and profile hidden from others.

Requirements Addressed

This flow addresses the design requirement: NR-3: Guard against the commodification of ethnicity and culture by allowing users to specify who can see their published recipes.

Part V

We developed both long term and short term evaluation plans to determine if Boxtie and its features succeed in meeting our design requirements. The long term evaluation would be a longitudinal study conducted over several months. The short term evaluation plan tests the features that seek to address our top two design requirements, along with general usability of the digital experience.