Cookery

Very often, when it comes to deciding what to cook, people explore various resources such as: Instagram, YouTube, food blogs, etc. to find the right and successful recipe. This makes it difficult to choose a recipe and start cooking, making the process long and confusing.

An app where people can find, share, and save recipes. That is, creating a kind of social network that will help develop the community of food enthusiast

Interview questions are compiled to learn more about the project, the vision of the stakeholders, information about the users, and the product goal to be achieved.

Who are primary users of the product?

What are the key features or functionalities that you believe should be prioritized on the product?

Who are the main competitors of the product industry?

What are the main goals and tasks users aim to achieve on the product?

What are your preferences or expectations when it comes to the visual design and overall user interface of the product?

What are the top 5 associations with your product that you would like your users to have?

After the interview, I structured the information and highlighted the key findings.

home cooks

food enthusiasts

food bloggers

professional chefs

Tasty

Yummly

Kitchen Stories

Cookpad

To become the leading social platform for culinary enthusiasts, where users can discover, share, and engage with high-quality, diverse recipes, fostering a global community of food lovers

minimalistic

innovative

user-friendly

accessibility

advanced search and filtering

recipe saving

discovery recipes

social interaction features

Community

Inspiration

Innovation

Friendly

Engaging

User interviews were conducted to better understand the target audience and their behaviors, pain points, and needs.

How often do you cook?

Where do you find recipes for cooking?

How long does it take to find new recipe?

Can you share your negative and positive experiences with recipe search?

What challenges do you encounter when trying to find new recipes?

Do you save your favorite recipes for the future? If so, where do you keep them?

When you cook, where do you prefer to have the recipe (notebook, phone, computer)?

How do you typically decide if a recipe is worth trying?

Do you often share recipes with friends or family? If so, how do you typically do this?

Have you ever had a food blog before? If so, what platform did you use?

After the interview, I structured the information and highlighted the key findings.

Users find recipes from a variety of sources, including cooking websites, social media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, cookbooks, cooking apps, and recommendations from friends or family. This indicates that there is no single resource where users can find recipes.

Users decide whether a recipe is worth trying based on factors such as the ingredients required, the complexity of the cooking method, the time required, user reviews, and the visual appeal of the dish. Providing detailed recipe information and user ratings can help users make informed decisions.

Users express a strong interest in advanced filtering options when searching for recipes. These advanced filters allow users to refine their search results based on specific criteria such as dietary restrictions (e.g., vegetarian, gluten-free), cuisine type (e.g., Italian, Asian), meal type (e.g breakfast, snacks, cakes), preparation time, ingredient preferences, and more.

Many people save their favorite recipes for future reference. They keep them organized in a lot of different ways, including bookmarking websites, saving screenshots, using saved messages in Telegram or Viber, or maintaining physical collections of recipes. This highlights the importance of providing robust recipe saving functionality within the app.

Sharing recipes is a very necessary function not only for ordinary people who share recipes with friends and family, but also for food bloggers who make money from it. They usually do it through social networks or personal websites.

Cooking is often hectic, so step-by-step instructions are helpful to focus on a particular cooking step. Guiding the user through the steps of cooking makes the process easier and more structured.

This analysis helped me understand the main features that need to be included in the product, as well as additional ones that will improve the user experience

Based on the information I gathered, I created two user personas that reflect two types of users who will use this product

32 years

Portland, OR

Master of Marketing

Married, has a child

Margo is the mother of a one-year-old boy and spends most of her time at home. Every day she comes up with different recipes that are delicious. Margo thought of starting a food blog to share her recipes.

Has limited time to blog on multiple platforms

She has never run a blog, so she has no experience.

Find a platform where she can easily share recipes

Discover new receipts to get inspired

Find her audience and get feedback from them

28 years

New York

Marketing Manager

Has a boyfriend

Emily is an ambitious 28-year-old marketing professional with little time to cook. But she enjoys cooking when she has time, so she values efficiency and looks for quick, easy-to-follow recipes that suit her tastes.

Limited time for searching receipt

Forgets which recipes she liked and wants to try to cook them again

Does not understand which recipes are successful and which are not

Not finding a recipe that can be made with the ingredients she has at home

Discover new recipes

Search for recipes using an advanced filter

Save recipes in different collections

Based on the data collected, I created CJM to identify the actions users take and the problems they face when finding recipes and cooking. In addition, ideas for improvements were generated that can be implemented.

The Search tab allows the user to quickly find the recipe they need using search and filters. Even if the user is not looking for something specific, there are categories, top chefs and popular recipes that may interest the user in cooking something.

Convenient function of saving recipes to collections and creating new collections makes further solutions of cooking faster and more thoughtful.

Users can create and share their own recipes using an intuitive recipe creation process. This allows users to add name of recipe, description, photos and videos, total time, ingredients, steps and tags.

The recipe page contains all the necessary details for users to cook: photo, description, cooking time, portion calculator, detailed description of each step and photos, and also page has reviews from other users. In addition to this cooking becomes convenient with step-by-step instructions. When the user turns on the step-by-step instructions, they are not distracted and can focus on a particular step of cooking, seeing what ingredients are needed and what needs to be done.

The Profile screen contains all necessary information about user activity: recipes created and collections. Users can also follow profiles they like to avoid missing useful content.