(IN-PERSON) SliceRight

SliceRight App Logo

IN_PERSON

Inspiration

As college students, coming out of the comfort of our homes to the bare apartments devoid of home-cooked meals has been a humbling experience. Cooking is a demanding, intricate activity that leads us to reach for the instant ramen or the frozen meals for quick gratification instead. Many university students are largely uneducated in how to cook meals for themselves, causing injuries, unhealthy eating, and overspending at restaurants. Newer cooks also proved to have limited practice with regard to technical skills such as julienning, dicing, whisking, etc.. Our team sought to bring a new appreciation for cooking as an art and achieve mastery in what we are unable to learn so far away from home. We created SliceRight, a mobile application that teaches and encourages inexperienced, aspiring cooks proper culinary skills through real-time AI-powered feedback, personalized accessibility settings, and skill-building motivation.

What We Learned

Accessibility was a key consideration when coming up with our app idea. We wanted to create an app that simplified cooking for everyone, including those with disabilities such as motor impairments. We deepened our understanding of how said disabilities affect cooking confidence and skill-building and provided accommodations to ensure we could reach an audience of all aspiring chefs, regardless of ability. We conducted research into how exactly motor disabilities affect cooking ability. For example, pots and pans are too heavy for certain people to lift, and the handles of utensils might also be hard for many people to hold, due to either tremors, hand conditions or hand shape. Additionally, we prioritized user-centered design, especially for beginners and users with different learning styles. To better understand our intended audience, we created and distributed a user testing Google Form to gather insights from individuals ranging from beginner to advanced. The form included questions about cooking confidence, accessibility, and preferred feedback styles, helping us validate our core features and identify areas for improvement. We also learned how to utilize gamification not as a way to pressure and create competition between users, but to motivate them. Lastly, because our app sought to utilize an emerging technology, we learned about the basics of AI for motion and audio analysis in a mobile setting.

How We Built Our Project

When considering the aspect of the prompt that introduced different modalities, we considered ways in which gestural movements and AI could be integrated into a space that we related to: cooking. The idea of visually analyzing the actual motions of cooking techniques was a core, guiding function of our application. Thus, we designed a feature with direct monitoring using visual AI to ultimately give objective technical feedback regarding the user’s cooking skills. From this initial idea, we further fleshed out the application to include more achievement based and profile building features, such as a “Fridge” in which special achievements are stored and a skill history that tracks the user’s activity within the app. When consulting a mentor, we realized an unaddressed point in that we could expand our potential audience to include people with motor impairments. This shifted the trajectory of our design process in that we created a questionnaire sequence geared towards learning more deeply about individual user’s needs and wants from the app. Based on their answers, the AI is supposed to recalibrate itself to account for these factors that might influence their technical skills. In considering the branding and visual elements, we were very attuned to contrast in color palette that would lead to better readability as well as the spacing of buttons that would make the interface easier to navigate. We focused on decreasing the cognitive load of users by creating less text-heavy frames and by maintaining consistency throughout the formatting and relative placement of icons.

Challenges We Faced

One of our biggest challenges was designing an app meant to support users with disabilities, despite not having direct or secondhand lived experience with disability ourselves. This limitation made us especially mindful about avoiding assumptions, and it emphasized the importance of conducting future user research and testing with a more diverse range of users.