CASE STUDY- 2021
Gamifying Food Prep for Cooking
OVERVIEW
Good nutritious food is a fundamental need for physical and mental well-being. Nymble believes young millennials, people who are busy, people who don't know how to or don't like to cook, everyone should be able to eat great food every day, cooked just for them. That is what Nymble is aiming to do : Food on Autopilot Using their robot ”Julia”. Know more about Julia
MY ROLE
Product, Visual Designer
TIMELINE
3 Weeks
TEAM
Individual Contributor
PROBLEM
The first step as part of using Julia required users to manually cut and dice veggies and food items for cooking. The question was: how can we keep the users engaged and interested during this step?
MY GOALS
- To make them feel fully engaged in the cooking process especially in the preparation part by trying to gamify the experience.
- To make them curious and feel good about themselves in the process of cooking.
- To make the chore of prepping before cooking less monotonous
GAME LEVEL DESIGN
Kitchen Brigade Hierarchy
For coming up with a level plan for the game I was inspired to follow the hierarchy of culinary chefs commonly practiced in professional kitchens and wanted to have each level names also resonate with this hierarchy and create a sense of growth in the game.
Kitchen brigade hierarchy
Home Screen
REWARDS / POINTS
Relatable Rewards
Unlike common rewards in games like points, stars, I wanted to come up with something that gives a relatable sense of achievement when actually completing tasks within the game.
Hand sketches exploring different ideas for rewards
Licks- enjoying tasty food
Game design
Synthesizing abstract ideas for mini-games, and thinking outside box than a standard point system to create a meaningful story.
1. Cyborgic hands
When measuring steps are done, the user can declare it as complete to gain licks accompanied with badges for specific milestones. I Have explored the use of AR and computer vision advancements in order to bring more competitiveness and authenticity to in-game goals.
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Mini Game - Cyborgic hands
2. Samurai vegetable warrior
Japanese knives are famous and known in the culinary industry I wanted to create an idea of a humor infilled game, with a storyline. So I picked on different dicing techniques and vegetables as in turn levels and milestones and a samurai warrior picks up new skills through reaching these milestones, which in turn unlocks special knives which they can use. Defeating vegetables they will be facing as opponents and killing them reveals unique animating badges.
Mini Game - Samurai vegetable warrior
Badge idea sketches
Okra slayer- animating badge
Samurai vegetable warrior - 2D level game, before unlocking achievement
Messaging and copy intent
Staying away from any kind of leaderboards so that no one feels demotivated, while at the same time engaging users for every small success with positive intent messages (in percentage terms) motivating them to play more.
Messaging intent sketches
Badge message
TAKEAWAY
Testing all of these ideas with potential and existing users were really gratifying for me I was able to shadow and observe multiple users in their natural behavior while running the prototype concepts, I knew I did a good job in some of the game ideas above as I noted most of the users were smiling and enjoying through whole user flow.
