What's Cooking
Making daily cooking and meal planning easy for all!
Role:
Sole UI/UX Designer
Timeline:
August-September 2021
Project Overview
A cookbook in your pocket!
A portable cookbook, What’s Cooking is an app designed to make everyday cooking hassle free. It is filled with recipes for all occasions- from day to day healthy bites to planning five course meals. The idea is to help people schedule meals and make healthier eating options more accessible.
This was a personal project done by me to better understand how to design a good User Experience.
Problem
One of the biggest obstacles faced by users is actually planning meals everyday. Busy schedules and the lack of easily accessible recipes often make cooking everyday difficult and tiring, especially when it comes to cooking healthy meals.
Solution
An app that helps people plan meals every-day by proving them with a catalogue of recipes that they can filter through based on their needs.
Whats Cooking also helps find meal options based on leftover groceries at home!
Research
I surveyed a total of 30 people who cook/ would like to cook regularly. I then mapped out their journeys and created empathy maps to better understand and define user needs.
The main insights from the research were as follows:
79%
people have to cook meals at home at least 5 times a week.
71%
said they found it difficult to plan meals, especially healthy ones.
cook only for themselves
cook for 2 people
cook for more than 2 people
Pain Points
1
Time
The biggest pain point for the users was the time it takes to plan and cook meals.
2
Ease
Users want easy, quick recipes that don’t take too much of their time and effort so they can plan their days better.
3
Healthy Options
Users want to make healthier food choices but don’t know a lot of healthy options.
4
Leftover Groceries
Users end up buying groceries and then end up with leftovers that they don’t know how to use.
User Personas
Ideation
After a thorough user research, I started brainstorming some initial ideas keeping in mind the user pain points. For this, I used the How Might We technique. Some of the questions were:​​
-
How might we help users plan their meals easily
-
How might we create an interface which encourages healthy choices
Site Map
Low- Fidelity wireframes
These rapid sketches helped generate ideas quickly that were later worked upon in detail.
It was important to give users information about time and nutritional value of a dish to help them plan their meals with ease.
Having an audio narration option would also help in making cooking more easy.
It was equally necessary to give users a way to make use of the produce at home at a given time to cook a meal, without having to go running for groceries.
Digital Wireframes
Some of the early digital iterations keeping in mind user pain points. This shows the onboarding and the important interactions.
Style Guide
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High-Fidelity Mockups
Meal planning and healthy eating is extremely important to have a good, balanced life.
This app can help you schedule your eating habits and maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Explore from a variety of categories so you never have to worry about what to cook!
YOUR POCKET COOKBOOK
Save your preferred recipes so you can easily keep coming back to them.
FAVOURITE LIST
STEP BY STEP RECIPES
Ingredient list with quantities and step by step instructions for the recipe.
Audio narration of the text making it more accessible.
Information about cook and prep time to help choose recipes
Nutritional information of the dish mentioned to help make healthier choices.
LEFTOVERS?
NO WORRIES!
One big problem with users is managing their groceries and leftovers.
This app will help you find recipes based on what ingredients you have at home.
You can now plan groceries accordingly and easily avoid waste.
High-Fidelity Prototype
Reflections and Takeaways
This was an interesting challenge because I learnt how to put the user at the centre and try to flesh out their biggest problems.
I also understood the importance of following through all the steps of the design process systematically to get to a refined end product.