Cookin'

• #DesignThinking
• #UX/UI
• #CaseStudy
• #Prototype

The challenge.

Normally we spend a lot of time in work, family, personal life, etc. relegating what we eat daily to the background. We set ourselves the following challenge: What if we gave users specific features beyond simple recipes?

Observe. Research.

We started the design thinking methodology with the desk research and netnography in order to dive into the users real needs day-to-day in terms of health and nutrition. Through the research questions we realized that what users really valued were the specific features related to:

• Well-being.
• Saving money.
• Planning and recipe inspiration.

We observe the app market through a comparison with outstanding apps (benchmarking) and a SWOT analysis to contextualize our possibilities, detecting the following aspects as strengths:

• Recipes based on ingredients you already have at home.
• Food expiration notifications to avoid wasting.
• Product scanning.

To complete this first phase of observation and research, we made a survey of 50 people from whom we were able to find out the following conclusions:

• People usually shop once a week.
• Little planning: it means wasting food.
• Tik tok and Instagram are the main networks used to consult recipes.
• Most usually cook 3-5 days a week.
• Little motivation to cook due to lack of time.

Synthesize.

We identified two possible user profiles, a planner and a non-planner. We drew empathy maps and defined a customer journey for each of them that led us to define a matrix of needs.

We identified the most significant pain points and concluded that our main target was the people who have no time, the skills or ideas to cook.

Ideate.

We identified the following insights:

• Feeling that the time spent cooking subtracts from leisure time.
• There is no planning.
• Laziness.
• Recipe inspiration comes from restaurants, RRSS, friends, etc.

We found that the functionalities (utility/viability matrix + MoSCoW) which would be a must to cover those insights would be:

• Obtain recipe ideas from the scan of products that the user has at home.
• Scan products during or after the shopping to create personalized expiration alerts and avoiding waste.

Therefore immediacy and avoiding waste (and therefore saving money) would be the app two main axes:

“Useful recipes and a simple product scanning process that will allow the user to configure expiration alerts and receive ideas of what to cook with what they have at home.”

Implement and Design.

We defined the flowchart of the process that the user would have to follow to scan products in order to obtain recipe prescriptions and to create expiration alerts. Once the sitemap was defined I worked on the wireframes.

Cookin’ App Prototype.

Cookin' is the app resulting from the design thinking process. It is a warm and intuitive prototype in Figma, not only simple but also with useful features committed to sustainability.