Case Study : Recipe App (2024)

My Personal Chef is a mobile app designed to give personalized suggestions of new dishes to people everyday, keeping in mind their diet goals & ingredients available. I completed this project as a part of design task given by IIT-Bombay for the position of UI/UX design intern. I was interviewed after submitting the project & yes, I got selected for the position.

Project type : Personal project

Duration : 5 days

Target audience : Tech savvy users in metropolitan cities

Tools used : Figma & FigJam

For this particular project, my design process was as follows

I chose this particular task to work on because I have personally experienced it. This gave me a deeper understanding of the problem, without much research. But since we’re finding a solution for others, I decided to do a quick research.

Research

I searched the web for relevant information. Here are my top three findings

1.Food habits of millennials

Millennials are a major part of our target audience. Studying their food habits was important. This article describes a survey where millennials were attracted towards,

• Healthier food options
• Experimenting with food combinations to make something new & unique
• Food items having a back story attached

💡 Inference:

• Suggest recipes according to user’s desired calorie intake
• Include brief & fancy description of dishes
• Ask users if they’d like to experiment or stick to traditional recipes

2. Identifying spices & pulses

Do you have trouble differentiating between pulses or spices? You’re not alone my friend. A lot of adults do. But here is a 3-year-old easily naming everything. So, how’s this relevant? 🤔

This video had been viral & a lot of websites mentioned how adults face problems identifying pulses or spices. The comments under the video further validated those statements. Our target audience might also face a similar problem.

💡Inference : Provide visual cues in the app. People shouldn’t have to leave the app to google how something looks. This will make our app beginner friendly & will help users get confident over time.

3. Too many competitors

There are thousands of similar apps in the market. Many of them have a very thoughtful & intuitive design. This means that the problem that we’re trying to solve has been already solved multiple times before.

💡 Inference : Provide a differentiating factor, a unique selling point. Why should users use this app rather than already available ones?

Major pain points

Apart from my findings, I was already provided with well defined user pain points in the task. The pain points were based on a user interview.

Once I properly understood everything, I had to decide what to design, a mobile app, website, web app or something else? I decided to design a mobile app simply because it’s easier to use mobiles while cooking in the kitchen when compared to other big & bulky devices.

Next step was to make a complete & detailed user flow. You’ll find each & every small detail in the following flow:

Once I completed the user flow, I made a list of features to be included within the app. Here’s the list

• Random recipe generator
• One unique recipe recommendation everyday
• Interactive cook along mode using voice assistant
• Calorie & steps tracker
• Order missing ingredients from popular food delivery apps
• Keep a track of kitchen inventory
• Suitable for absolute beginners
• Recipes of all your favorite chefs under one app
• Changes quantity of ingredients as per requirement
• Save a recipe for later

Finally, it was time to start designing.

Working with fast-paced startups taught me that it is okay to design high-fidelity wireframes & iterate them directly. That’s what I did. After all the iterations possible within the timeframe, here are the final results:

I decided to include some empty states & edge cases as well within the wireframes. I thought it’ll show my recruiter that I know how to think about & tackle such situations.

Once I had a basic structure ready, it was time to add a little life to it.

Here’s a basic interactive prototype. Feel free to play around!

Testing

I didn’t get a chance to test my designs out yet. Going further, I’d like to test my designs, understand where my users are facing issues & iterate accordingly. I still have some more things to add to the app which will enhance the user experience, but I won’t do it before getting proper feedback on the current version.

It was fun to work on this project. To be very honest, I was procrastinating my portfolio update since a long long time. But thanks to the tight deadline given, I was not just able to complete the project but also document my process side-by-side.