Meet Lini (pictured above)! Your helpful pasta noodle here to make your cooking lessons more meaningful .

With a team of 5 undergraduates interested in UI/UX research and design, we worked together over the course of 8 weeks to design a platform promoting the learning of language and culture through an activity rich in both: cooking.

In a time where the celebration and understanding of diverse cultures is important, today's fast-paced lifestyle leaves students and non-students alike lacking in time to learn how to cook for themseleves or to even develop a connection to their cultural identity and the culture of the people around them.

Our main findings based on all our 60 respondents include that survey respondents show an interest in learning their own culture or other cultures, and one-fifth of all respondents did not know how to cook food from their own cultures.

Conducting 10 interviews we found that simpler instructions and shorter recipes were preferred, pictures and videos enhance learning while also boosting user experience, users enjoy receiving rewards for completion of their tasks,  the average time spent cooking was 30 to 180 minutes, and there was a high interest in learning their or their loved one’s cultural foods and language to show appreciation.

As a team, we conducted a competitive analysis research in order to learn more about the current apps or software that are already available to those who are interested in learning how to cook. We analyzed the important features and decided on whether or not this app or software used those features successfully.

To cultivate the bond between students and their cultural identities, our solution is to design a platform promoting the learning of language and culture through an activity rich in both: cooking.

Features:

+ A tutorial that helps the user understand how to use the application.
+ A sticker collecting feature inspired by game-ified apps where reaching completion of a cultural recipe, the user will receive a cute sticker of the food along with a description. They can view all their stickers in their sticker book.
+ A homepage that is based off of filtered searches, recommendations, and more.

I pushed for a mascot for this app as I was heavily inspired by Duolingo’s bird, and with that idea I came up with the simple L shaped macaroni that my other graphic designers were able to draw it to life.

As for the stickers, we had a lot of trouble matching every person’s art style with one another since we were all working on it as a team, but thankfully we were able to pull from appliances like Pinterest to agree on a more simple design as to not overwhelm users with heavy graphics.

We completed the finishing touches on the last week as well as prepared a presentation for out Demo Day. With this being my very first UI/UX project, my team won 1st place overall and also People’s Choice Award against 9 other teams!

Languini has a lot of features that could definitely be further developed if we had more time, but with the 8 weeks that we had, I think we did very well in reaching the solution that we had in mind when designing the app.

I would also like to thank my fellow team members for being so communicative and understanding with one another, as we had issues with suddenly having to change a big feature but we were able to adapt. Communication and understanding is 100% the key to success!

Live Demo