Project overview
To design a user-friendly app that provides healthy cooking recipes for users who want to live a healthy lifestyle.
The following project represents a hypothetical academic exercise and does not reflect work endorsed by the representative brand.
Project approach
My principle is “Start design with Why” to clearly understand why users need this app. I should know what the users’ goals are like and how they achieve them. The wrong way is to ask them directly what they need, the right way is to observe and ask what goals they are trying to achieve and how they are going to do this. The Target audience belonged to different walks of life. I selected to interview different types of users—both male and female, with different level of experience in cooking, people with different familiarity with technologies, people who cook often and occasionally. User Interviews consisted of mostly open ended questions pertaining to the knowledge of cooking and its frequency along with its pain points.
Research
Ideation
Wireframe
Design
Problem statement
How might we design a simple application that helps us reduce cognitive load and prepare healthy meals while working full time jobs
Primary research
I compiled a comprehensive set of questionnaires for a specific targeted audience and asked some open-ended questions. It was difficult to recruit participants I was looking for who was willing to be a part of the study. I learnt to listen and observe them, so I conducted a contextual enquiry.
​​
Persona
Validate Hypothesis
Majority of interviewees were Millenials who were frustrated with dealing to choose with work and taking care of eating healthy meals with available ingredients in the pantry.
75%
Frustrated
15%
Can't Decide
Likes meal planning
10%
Note to future Jananya: What were you thinking? Look at that contrast!
Information architecture
Styleguide
The application layout is structured around intuitive navigation, high readability, light background, and eye-catching visuals. The light and airy background sets the effective space for a variety of photos and graphics that may come with the recipes. Clear and solid typography based on san-serif fonts makes the information scannable and legible on the screens of different sizes. Color contrast is used for amplifying quick navigation: bright color accents attract users’ attention to interactive zones and active states of the layout elements.
Cook easy
After several iterations of pretotyping and improving from feedback to develop a working prototype
Main Screens
Personalization of applications and websites is one of the hot trends in user experience design for a couple of recent years. It’s not enough to give users the product to solve their problem – it’s cool to give them the ability to tune the interface so that it corresponded to their specific needs. That encourages designers to consider more functionality with which users may customize the features according to their personal preferences.
That what’s Perfect Recipe app features, too. At the start of the interaction, users set the goals they want to achieve such as losing or gaining weight, keeping a healthy diet and the like. Also, they may mark the ingredients they don’t like so that the app didn’t show the recipes containing them. So, the feed of recipes and search results will provide the personalized list, not wasting users’ time with the information that doesn’t suit their tastes.
You can manually add your ingredients from your home screen and the API would suggest possible dishes that can be made with it. You can also personlize it by filtering the option to different cuisine. One more way to personalize the recipe selection in the system of filters. The filter panel allows a user to sort out the list of recipes. The user can apply pre-sets: for example the preset “cook” shows only the recipes based on the ingredients currently available for the user. Also, the filters can be manually customized.
For ease of planning ahead meals and to reduce meal prep time. We have two additional calendar features and the possibility of adding the missing ingredients to the shopping list by integrating the e-commerce experience.
We’ve been designing usable interfaces like a chef cooking edible food. Indeed, we all want to eat edible foods with nutritional value, but we also crave flavour. Why do we settle for usable when we can make interfaces both functional and pleasurable?” Aaron Walter said in his book “Designing for Emotion“. With high competition and a constantly growing number of mobile apps devoted to the theme of food and cooking, the first impression cannot be just lovely and clean. The successful app, in this case, should instantly appeal to the emotional and aesthetic sides of user perception and be simple to use to engage the user from the first seconds and let them interact according to their personal preferences.
