Understanding User Needs for Task Guidance Systems Through the Lens of Cooking

To design intuitive and effective context-aware task guidance systems, we must understand users’ thought processes and the obstacles they experience when they perform tasks. Though task guidance systems have proven beneficial in many domains for improving task performance and reducing user frustration, there is a lack of general guidelines and design principles for their development. Prior work has shown that recipe-based cooking is a strong medium for studying task planning and execution. In response, we conducted a contextual inquiry study in home kitchens, observing eight different participants’ cooking sessions. We used affinity diagramming of our notes and transcripts to identify common obstacles faced by participants and establish user needs in the areas of object interaction, safety, knowledge base, and task coordination. We discuss how these findings can inform the design of technology-driven solutions for task guidance systems beyond cooking.