Everyone loves great food, but not many are fans of cooking. Due to the covid situation, more people are regularly cooking at home but often struggle with thinking of recipes.
As a personal project, I decided to create PantryCook – a mobile app that helps anyone to cook with the ingredients they already have.
Role
Duration
Tools
UI UX Designer
3 Months
(June 2020- August 2020)
Figma, Miro, Flowmap and Adobe Suite.
Due to the covid situation, people have found it necessary to cook regularly at home. So I decided to create Pantrycook, a mobile application that will help users cook efficiently with the only ingredients in their pantry.
The new restrictions and prevention measures have been the push many people to start cooking to provide themselves with healthy and affordable meals for the day. A survey conducted by theNew York Times:
"54 percent of respondents said they cook more than before the pandemic, 75 percent said they have become more confident in the kitchen, and 51 percent said they would continue to cook more after the crisis end".
It came down to two groups – students who are learning to cook on their own and busy adults with a full-time job who are interested in learning how to cook.
To make it easy for anyone to find new cooking recipes and to have an updated grocery shopping list.
People don’t know what to cook with the ingredients they already have at home. Time is wasted, people become less motivated to cook, and end up ordering take-out, especially during the covid situation.
"With my items" is a feature that filter recipes based on the available pantry in your home;
The "Search Screen" provides a way for the user to look for specific recipes & includes filters like difficulty level, allergies, category and so on.
"My pantry" shows ingredients and products that have been added to the app. To add products manually, receipts can be scanned or items can be added manually.If an ingredient is about to run out, it can be added to the "Grocery list" as a reminder the next time the user goes shopping.
In the “Recipes section,” the user can review information about the meal, the ingredients needed, nutritional facts, and reviews from other users. If the user wants to create this meal, he’ll follow the steps provided by PantryCook with the option "Let's cook this."
"Inclusive" - Thinking about international dishes, I decided to tag the recipe to its original country to educate the user.
The research aimed to determine how the target audience, students, and people with busy schedules, cook at home. By fulfilling this research, i want to know the routines carried out by users in the kitchen and the complications they might have.
How do you know about cooking? Is there any inspiration?
Do you cook frequently?
Do you cook a meal to last one day, or do you try to prepare for two or three days?
To collect information, I used an online survey with 27 participants including students about to graduate and others who had a full-time job.
Interviews
Survey
27 of the participants agreed to do a survey and agree to gives as much information as possible. Participants age: 20 - 25, and their occupations are students and full-time jobs.
The survey was filled on a google form.
Putting on paper what matters most to users, and keeping them in mind for the ideation phase to bring them to life.
Participants mentioned specifics apps they have used as an online resource for cooking.
[I1] "Videos for sure are more helpful than a blog. Hearing the instructions is great when cooking."
[I4] "the app allows you to send a private message to other cookpad users."
[p4] "I love how in Cookpad one can share your recipe and connect with other chefs.
Of the participants cook to take care of their health, to reduce expenses or for gratification.
[p6] "why cooking? To know what goes into my food, I feel like eating out you don't know what all ingredients are used."
[p11] "I decided to cook to reduce the cost of eating out."
[p10]" I decided to cook to be more independent."
[i5]" My dishes need to be balanced since I'm trying not to gain weight."
With the collected data, I organized them into categories to see what features should be added to the app. Take a peek at the process below:
The collected research led me to create personas for my target group
Going down 3 roads to ensure the user experience is on par with my intentions.
- Creating an account
- Deciding what to cook using the app
- Use the grocery shopping list
See here the Userflows
Playing with sketches to see how to best fit the highlighted features for my users.
Home – The highlighted recipes and filters are shown
Pantry/Add items – To see the ingredients available at home
Grocery List – To take for grocery shopping
Home/Notification – To alert the user that they’re out of a food item
Pantry/Sections – To see what is available according to different sections
Recipe – To see the ingredients, nutritional data, instructions, and the instructional video for each recipe
Using a low-fidelity design for user-testing. The outcomes will allow me to make necessary shifts and adjustments to improve the flow and designs.
It was important to find 3 people who didn’t know the application. Here are some of the problems we discovered:
Lack of originality on the home screen.
Difficulty to use the CTA “add item” on “My pantry” screen.
Difficulty to understand "Grocery List" and visualization of the “Pantry” CTA.
After finding these problems, selected screens were redesigned to improve the user experience.
After being confident with the final low-fidelity designs based on the user tests, I transformed it into a visual design to capture the overall look and feel of PantryCook.
Interested in seeing what the final PantryCook prototype looks like?
Check it out (prototype link)
