Recipeasy

1. Prototype link (Please submit a link to a playable prototype, not a link to your design file) [https://www.figma.com/proto/wESzqnOi5VIBAiS3yKHygL/Rice-Design-a-Thon-Figma-File?page-id=35%3A2&type=design&node-id=99-1387&viewport=1380%2C449%2C0.56&t=j1TWJ1po54BZvOj8-1&scaling=scale-down&starting-point-node-id=99%3A1387&mode=design]

2. Describe your project (max 150 words)

Cooking well-balanced and nutritious meals is crucial to developing healthy eating habits and sustaining a balanced lifestyle. However, for college students with packed schedules, it can be difficult to find the time or money to cook healthy meals (or any meal in general!). Our team designed a mobile solution called Recipeasy, intended to help college students find recipes best suited to their dietary needs, busy schedules, and diverse tastes. We wanted to focus on making recipe information (such as total time needed to cook meals, serving size, and nutritional information) clearly accessible from first glance at the recipe page so that college students in a pinch could quickly and easily gleam critical information for their potential dinners.

1. Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources. (Max 500 words)

We conducted an initial ideation session by each brainwriting common challenges that we face as undergraduate college students: an idea we both had in common was a meal prep/dorm recipe application, so we decided to create a recipe finding app for college students.

We conducted an initial survey to gauge common challenges that college students face when it comes to cooking. We created an affinity diagram to analyze the qualitative data from the survey–it was found that most respondents struggled with time, budgeting, and finding new recipes. Most respondents also prefer to cook meals that are versatile, quick, and easy. We also conducted 2 qualitative interviews with other undergraduate college students.

Survey form: https://forms.gle/ZLWZoFz7TLLDeEEo9 Interview Questions: How often do you cook or prepare meals for yourself? What motivates you to cook or prepare meals at home? Can you walk me through your typical process when deciding what to cook and preparing your meals? What tools or resources do you use for meal preparation? Are there specific challenges you currently face when it comes to cooking or meal prepping? What would you say are your favorite foods to prepare/cook? Why? How do you incorporate cooking or meal preparation into your busy schedule as a student? Are there specific features that would be helpful for preparing special meals for busy times? Do you have any goals when cooking or preparing meals?

1. Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words)

One of the main findings from our research was that students struggle with finding time to cook meals. One specific response noted that they would like to filter recipes by the time required; we implemented an “Under 30 Minutes” section on the homepage, to make it easily accessible for students. Several respondents stated that they struggle with finding and remembering new recipes. We remediate this problem by allowing users to save recipes to different collections – these collections can be sorted on the “Saved” page.

In one of our interviews, the respondent said they found it frustrating when online recipes didn’t have pictures at certain points in the recipe; sometimes they are unsure what the food should look like at a certain point, for example, what color it should be. In the recipe page, we implemented a feature for the user to click a photo icon to see what the food should look like at that step. The image of the food pops up as an overlay, so as to reduce cognitive overload on the initial recipe page.

In another interview, our respondent indicated that they had many allergies they needed to be considered when searching for recipes. However, they stated that because their allergies are permanent, they didn’t want to keep selecting those ingredient restrictions every single time they wanted to find a recipe – because of this, in the filters page, we abstained from including ingredient restrictions and instead opted to have ingredient restrictions permanently removed from the catalog via the profile settings page. On a similar note, we decided to keep the ‘Diet’ section on the search page despite it being present on the profile page and instead have the search page set by default to the options indicated on the profile page. This is because we wanted the feature to reflect the ability for diets and diet preferences to change (ex. High-protein, keto, weight loss, etc) without permanently setting these preferences, in comparison to allergies which rarely change.

Built With

• figma