Team
Individual Project
My Role
UX/UI Designer
Duration
2 weeks
Methods and tools
User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Competitive Analysis, User Persona, User flows, Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Google Drive, Figma, Miro.
Overview
Bite n’ Share is an app for anyone who likes and does cooking. It was created by me as my passion project and will allow you to search and save recipes and build balanced grocery lists by saving recipes you want to try.
The Problem
Cooking is an essential part of our daily routine. All cooking lovers know the feeling of frustration when they want to cook something new but all of their recipes are scattered everywhere. They might be saved like screenshots on their phones or written down on pieces of paper. We end up having so many recipes but not knowing where they are and where to find them when we want to cook.
The Solution
I designed a mobile app that will not only help users to discover new recipes and filter them for a more personalized experience but also create their own recipes, saving and organizing them to their own taste. Users could also save time on grocery shopping by creating a grocery list and adding missing ingredients directly from the recipe.
Research
To figure out a potential solution for this case study, I used Design Thinking, as it provides a solution-based approach for problem-solving :
Empathize-Define-Ideate-Prototype-Test
User Interviews
I conducted 5 face-to-face interviews with cooking enthusiasts and sent out a survey to dozens more to gain a better understanding of their cooking habits and recipe management strategies. Here are some of the major questions I asked and answers I received:
Research Objectives:
Investigate how users save a recipe and what happens after
Know how they sort saved recipes
Understand what makes users frustrated while preparing a meal
Identify what will encourage them to cook more
Research Takeaways:
Users spend a lot of time finding the right recipe
Users have difficulties in organizing and sorting recipes
Users usually take screenshots to save recipes or just memorize them
Users don't have much time for cooking and always have missing ingredients
Users manually write a grocery list
The Persona
Using research insights I defined a user persona that reflected the frustrations, habits, and goals of the target user. Creating a user persona allowed me to imagine the future organizer app features in the context of people's unique needs and goals.
“User needs a way to quickly save favorite recipes and keep them all organized in one place to easily share with others.”
Low Fi Wireframes
Usability Test
5 users completed various tasks within the app, giving me the opportunity to test the prototypes to see what errors I have and what can i do to fix them. I asked users to perform multiple tasks to see how they find recipes as first-time users of the app, how they filter them and save the ones they like, and how they organize saved recipes and share them with others.
Key Takeaways:
The user has no problem searching for recipes and applying filters. It is easy to orientate through the interface. But the filter icon is hard to find
Sometimes the user experiences difficulty sharing the grocery list. It appears that it’s not clear enough where is the option “Share”
Sometimes the user is confused about how to add a new recipe, the “+” icon appears to be not enough visible.
Final Design
After iterating the design I was able to update the design of the app.
Easily search for recipes and filter them to narrow down the options. Need to cook something having specific ingredients? Search by key ingredients. Have limited time? Apply search by cooking time!
Read reviews and share recipes with others. Don’t have all the ingredients? Add missing ingredients from the recipe to your grocery list!
Add a recipe by creating your own one or search the web
Organize saved recipes, and add your own collections of recipes to self-created folders.
Add items to your grocery list, and share them with others. Set a reminder for grocery shopping on any day of the week. A digital grocery list is so convenient!
HIGH-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
Next Steps
There are numerous competing recipe organizer apps available. I focused on features that solve the major issues users face when deciding what to cook to save their time and make cooking a breeze. Future steps would involve high-fidelity testing to receive user feedback and final iterations to have a successful final product. I would also want to implement some more useful features. In particular, I would like to add:
- Profile feature of being able to post recipes and follow other cooking lovers to keep users engaged with the app
- "Hands-Free Mode" feature to follow the cooking process instead of touching the phone with food fingerprints.
-Meal Plan to organize and schedule meals for days, weeks, and a month.
-Timer function which will help users keep track of cooking and walk away from the stove to tend to other tasks.