ReciMe

Proof of Concept

Project Overview

Cooking for me, personally has always been kind of a pain. I want to cook exciting food with great flavors but it never comes to par with ordering in our eating out. I do want to cook for myself more, as does everyone else, because it's better for my wallet as well as my body. Plus who wants to rely on on eating out?
Some of the hardest things, especially for me, are ingredients! One problem is finding the right ingredients, and another is what to do with them after buying them for making a certain dish. Even though I can make something out of some of the main ones, the produce and perishable items often go to waste. One solution would be to keep making the same dish until the ingredients run out. But who wants to eat the same thing for more than one meal?

Goal

Design an app that helps the user most efficiently find the ingredients they want, find the recipes they want and then know what to make with it after. It should be totally accessible and easy to use both at home and when shopping for groceries.

Process

End User Research

I curated a survey with Google forms and sent it to a variety of people. I made sure that the questions were not leading - I made no mention of recipe or cooking app. I took liberty with that during the following user interviews.
Aside from the 2 pie charts shown, other important information gathered was that 76% of respondents said they wanted to cook more and 91.2% do not use a meal delivery or prep service.

Referring to the bar graph, most people stated the hassle of getting and keeping ingredients was a major pain point. Better recipes was a tertiary pain point.

I wanted to highlight the basic yet most important functions this app would feature, with an emphasis on specific needs not addressed by ones on the market. For example, dietary profile and healthy recipes

Rudimentary Information Architecture plan

Some more in-depth interviews with users yielded that some target consumers "honestly haven't thought about using an app to help with cooking" and that they "preferred cooking with less ingredients."
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Another insight was that there was "no app to account for what equipment I have"

NONE of those who interviewed regularly used apps for cooking regularly, which is not the case at all for other life functions such as fitness, banking, etc.

From the research and pool of users, I have created 3 user personas representing the demographics of the surveyed users

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End User Interviews
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User Personas

Card Sort

I wanted to take account of all the features of the primary and secondary functions

Competitive Analysis

I looked at the main competitor for my app - SuperCook. It gets the job done, but has many basic user experience flaws. For starters, too many options! Don't give the user over a thousand options, many of them repeating at that. While it has functionality, the UX has a lot to be desired.

The landing page looks good enough on first inspection. But again, too many options. It is also a nearly infinite scrolling page overwhelming the user. I did not have that many ingredients yet it gave over a thousand possible recipes.

On the left is how the landing looks, even after being cropped

Above is the page when clicking on a recipe. You can see the tags, have the option to favorite and see prep time as well as ingredients and how to prep them. However, to see the full recipe, you'd need to click the pink button and be redirected to a browser as seen below.