Recipe Box
Rethinking Meal Planning


Helping “connected chef moms” plan meals and manage their inventory of ingredients.

Techniques

  • Wireframing
  • High-fidelity design
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Personas
  • Ethnography
  • Heuristic Analysis

Design

Initially, we intended to design a recipe organization app, but through iterative design, we discovered there were other opportunities to meet user needs through unique features.

The result is an app that addresses various user concerns




Scanning Reciepts: Knowing what ingredients you have


Suggest Recipes: Ones you have the time and ingredients to make.


Weekly Shopping Lists: generated based off current inventory and what you plan to make in the coming days.


Wireframes/Flows


Research

User Base

Women do two-thirds of all household grocery shopping in the United States. About 75% of them prepare for shopping by making grocery lists (Retail Leader). 60% of moms own smart phones, compared to about half of both typical men and women. Of them, top uses of smartphones include looking up store information and keeping family schedules (Female Factor). Our target user base is primarily tech-savvy millennial women and secondarily husbands who help out with family duties.

Competitive Analysis

Several apps exist that can help with shopping list preparation. There are also some pantry inventory-keeping apps, and generic receipt scanning apps with OCR capabilities. However, significant gaps exist in what each app offers. In particular, there is no app that can automatically understand what you are buying all at once and keep inventory for you. This feature is an important part of our unique selling proposition. Future threats could include retailers offering customers open access to their individual loyalty card purchase data.

Conceptual Target

Connected Chef Moms

Context

Mobile phone goes with her shopping. Phone and tablet for discovering recipes and planning.

User Insights

  • Sometimes I want a recipe that doesn’t require me to go shopping
  • Often I’m busy and want something fast and easy
  • I want to be able to organize and share recipes I find online
  • When I’m at the store, I want to know what I need to buy
  • I would like to consolidate shopping trips
  • It’s easy to waste perishable ingredients without planning
  • I don’t like touching my phone with messy hands while cooking

Personas

Jill is an affluent, suburban mother of 3 who enjoys cooking healthy meals for her family and being thrifty with money. She uses her phone and tablet throughout the day to stay organized and feel connected to others. She sometimes grocery shops with a page taken out of her favorite cookbook or with a recipe pulled up on her phone to guide her on what she needs. Finding a recipe that she has all the ingredients for without shopping can be frustrating and time-consuming.

High-Fidelity Designs

Favorites

Each recipe that ends up in our app implies it already passed a user’s personal preference gateway, so we decided not to put the voice of the crowd in a user's private collection; we instead emphasize personal “favoriting.”

Sorting/Filtering

Users want to immediately rule out and avoid temptation of recipes that don’t fit their diet and which they don’t have time or ingredients to make. Sorting favorites vs. filtering invites users to be adventurous but offers a tried and true fallback.



REFERENCES:

1 - http://www.retailleader.com/top-story-consumer_insights-study__women_still_dominate_grocery_shopping-2053.html 2- http://www.thefemalefactor.com/statistics/statistics_about_women.html 3 - http://poshonabudget.com/2011/04/50-statistics-about-grocery-shopping-that-you-may-want-to-know-about.html#axzz3KPb0qdfa

Various icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com is licensed under CC BY 3.0