EPICURIOUS
What We've Done
simplifying complicated global recipes for amateur student cooks
What We've Done
We've created an empowering tool for users to explore and prepare easy, diverse, and nutritious meals – a mobile app that simplifies and transforms complicated cultural recipes into different difficulty levels, and breaks down each recipe by offering step-by-step visual guides with must-have and substitutable ingredients. At the end of the day, users build up confidence and comfort in cooking through nutritious, easy, and cultural recipes.
What Users Said
We focus on:
The availability of an easy avenue of learning new recipes with simplified instructions through a cultural lens.
We target:
Students who are new to cooking and/or lack confidence in cooking, but want to branch out and try cooking new, nutritious, and easy meals.
Initial Storyboard
The initial prototype is a rough draft that illustrates how we envision our mobile app layout to be. The layout includes a main page with an interactive map and options to filter recipes according to the cooking time needed and difficulty. Interviewees found the application “useful” and “intentional”, and they didn’t have much difficulty navigating around the app.
Prototype
We added slides to demonstrate our step-by-step instructions and have interviewees follow through the steps to cook a meal. This helps to create a more direct cooking scenario that helps us assess whether the app satisfies the design goal or not. Some feedback that we have received is that the unlabelled map wasn’t as intuitive/easy-to-use as it could be. To address this in our design, we added country names and different cuisine region names onto the map for easier navigation. Moreover, the interviewer found it somewhat confusing to navigate the cuisine list since there were a bunch of cuisines, some of which he had never heard of. A way to combat this in our design would involve adding keywords to the cuisine list page, along with a small picture and/or short description. These updates are reflected in the final Figma prototype.
Final Figma Prototype
Our Figma prototype features an updated version of our last prototype, but with more interactivity. We also fleshed out some personalization, including interfaces that help a user create an account, take a survey to tailor future recipes, and see saved recipes.
Post-Prototyping Design Idea
Closing Reflections
This has been a rewarding experience, and I am proud of what we have accomplished over the past few months. At the beginning of our process, we came in with a lot of solutions in mind, which limited our potential avenues to explore since we were already making assumptions about our user group. Through conducting user interviews, we discovered new and interesting insights, which have led us to user problems that we haven’t identified and the opportunity to incorporate multiple of our ideas into one solution to solve our user problem.
I love that we were able to gain true insight into the user-centered design process by learning about our audience and their needs to find the problem, design solutions, and prototyping. Though challenging at first, It was very rewarding to see everything come together in the final prototype.