Savr Recipes
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Project Overview Description Savr Recipes is a startup that aims to make home cooking convenient and intuitive for at-home chefs through a variety of recipes and cooking tips. By understanding the struggles of home chefs through interviews, users expressed their disappointment at the level of difficulty and lack of clarity in their directions. Throughout this design sprint, I designed a step-by-step process with video tutorials to enable users to better understand the steps as they follow the recipe.
My Roles
Design Tools
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Exploring the Problem Problem With the many people who are busy nowadays, they all want to cook something that doesn’t take a lot of time. However, users sometimes find the recipe they follow to be frustrating and difficult to follow. The goal is to find a solution for home chefs to make their cooking enjoyable by making recipes easier to follow and understand.
Solution ● Inform users about the level of expertise in food recipes and the duration it would usually take to prepare the food before cooking. ● Incorporate imagery and videos throughout the cooking process for home chefs to follow through. ● Design a step-by-step tutorial feature for users to understand how each cooking process works. ● Utilize a checklist for users to complete each cooking task as an alternative to the step-by-step tutorial feature.
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User Understanding User Persona With a user persona, I was able to empathize with and understand the individual’s characteristics, which helped me learn more about their goals and allow them to have an enjoyable experience while cooking.
User Map Now that I understand the user’s goal, I sketched out a user journey map to find an end-to-end solution that provides a simpler cooking experience.
Screenshot of user map
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Ideate Inspirations
I began by analyzing and comparing other cooking apps to see how I could implement different design aspects into my sketches. Tasty, Yummly, and Epicurious food apps are my main inspirations for proceeding with my design sketches.
Sketches Sketching out rough ideas proven to to be very efficient for conceptualization. I mainly focused on the screens that users tend to be frustrated with and include step-by-step features and checklists for users to complete. I made sure to include a lot of visuals to communicate with the users and to enable them to follow the recipe easier.
Screenshot of 8-framed sketches
Solution Sketch With my solution screen, I drew a panel of sketches to get an idea of what screens the user interacts with before and after. The solution sketch includes the journey of the process a user would go through when using Savr Recipe.
Screenshot of sketched design decision
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Storyboard To avoid the users feeling unconfident and unprepared, I made sure to incorporate interactive checkmarks and checklists into the step-by-step process of each recipe. This allows users to prepare ahead of time before going into the next step. I also implemented the step-by-step tutorial feature for the users to go through the cooking process and understand each step of the recipe easier via visual communication.
Storyboard 1 - Instructional Checklist
Screenshot of Storyboard 1
Storyboard 2 - Step-by Step Tutorial Mode
Screenshot of Storyboard 2
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Prototyping With my storyboard complete, I proceeded to create a high-fidelity prototype to test the usability of my proposed solution. For the app’s visual design, I based it off of the Savr Recipes logo and tried to emulate the overall feeling of the brand. I also kept the overall design minimalistic in order for users to skim through the contents without difficulty.
Figma Prototype Link: https://figmashort.link/4ykhCW Savr Recipes Prototype Testing: https://vimeo.com/889231530
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Usability Testing I conducted 1:1 remote usability tests with 5 participants who are also at-home chefs and want to cook simple and easy recipes. The goal was to see if the users were able to determine the ease of use when using the prototype and if they would use the app to cook a recipe on a busy day.
As a result, the participants went through the prototype quite smoothly and overall had a good impression of it. The testing may have some drawbacks or be in need of improvement to the overall structure, but the majority of users found the app prototype to be a significant improvement to their experience in food recipe usage, and the project goals were met with satisfaction.
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Takeaway and Future Improvements Overall, the majority of users found significant improvements in the recipe consumption experience, and project goals were met with satisfaction. While the project duration may be limited in the design sprint, I have learned a lot about the desires of at-home chefs while doing it. Many people prefer to cook an easy and convenient meal during busy times and want recipes to be easily followed. Which is why it is imperative to improve one’s experience by making cooking enjoyable with recipe apps that can visually communicate with at-home chefs so they can easily understand how the cooking process works.
Things I Would Like to Have Done More Of: ● Include header when scrolling down so the users can see both the ‘go back arrow’ and the food name when they scroll down through the recipe page. ● Enable other users to add notes or suggest tips so that other users could add notes to the food recipes they used in order to remind them in the future if they cook the same recipe again.