Cheffin'
Project: January - April 2022
My function: Product designer of the entire project
This project was the result of my thesis.
Overview
Cheffin' is a case study of a cooking app that makes it easy to find recipes and inspiration right on your phone. It allows for the sharing of recipes and interactions between users, as well as delivering a personalized experience of tastes and diets for those who choose.
Challenges
-
Create a revenue sharing tool powered by users themselves;
-
Help amateur users to make recipes with ease;
-
Design an intuitive, practical and pleasant to use interface;
-
Offer a tool that allows users to organize their recipes;
-
Create an interface that encourages users to find new recipes according to their profile.
Understanding the demand
Being an academic project, the first step in the project wasdesk research (literary review), where I was able to validate the viability of the product in the market and how much it could really help people. Here, I took into account the period of the pandemic and its influence on the increase in home cooking fans, being able to highlight that...
Increase of
35%
of mobile screen time in Brazil in 2021 compared to 2019*
Increase of
22%
of items related to basic food in supermarket carts, which means an increase in home cooking**
the creative cuisine
is the one that most
moves shares on online platforms***
From there, it could be concluded that with the social isolation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the habit of cooking at home has increased compared to before and the internet has contributed to new learning and greater creativity in the area, encouraging the habit.
Market analysis
On the internet, recipes are sharedboth in diverse social networks and in specific applications, therefore, for an efficient market analysis, both were analyzed in relation to their most useful functions observed by articles within the theme. It is worth noting that at the project level, in "direct competitors", a SWOT analysis was carried out on the main ones, a technique that helped to find the project requirements later on.
Social networks used to share recipes in 2021/2022
direct competitors
Getting to know the users
Understanding the market, I started to understand the users, carrying out an online quantitative survey aimed at people who knew or were interested in cooking. The questionnaire reached 101 people - which all of them knew or were interested in cooking - and it was important for insights, creating personas and defining product objectives.
SECUNDARY PERSONA
Isabela
30 years old
Productor working on a hybrid model
Isabela works in a hybrid way between home office and face-to-face and lives with her fiance. Because she has a busy routine and cannot eat out every day, she cooks several dishes for the whole week, thus needing variation and practicality to find her menu for the week.
Goals
-
Create a weekly menu without difficulty;
-
Know the time of each dish;
-
Have recipes saved and sorted in one place.
Frustrations
-
Wasting time with long videos and unnecessary information;
-
Not finding recipes that are well classified and timed correctly.
PRIMARY PERSONA
George
23 years old
Studying Biology
Jorge is a beginner cook, he cooks for pleasure (hobbie) and with a low frequency of only two or three meals a week. He likes to cook to eat something different without spending a lot, testing recipes mainly for snacks and dinners.
Goals
-
Learn to cook the basics;
-
Try cymbals different;
-
Don't spend too much.
Frustrations
-
Recipes with ingredients in grams;
-
Common ingredients and no substitution.
TERTIARY PERSONA
Viviane
28 years old
Postgraduate in Literature
Viviane shares housework with her mother and cooks about five to six times a week, depending on her routine. Viviane was found to be allergic to gluten, while her mother is lactose intolerant, making her a food-conscious person.
Goals
-
Find recipes for allergy sufferers;
-
Maintain a healthy diet for yourself and your mother;
-
Share the benefits of your diets.
Frustrations
-
Unclassified gluten-free recipes;
-
Difficulty varying within the diet.
Beginning the journey
Understanding the users, I followed with a list of content and tools requirements, which gave scope to the application and the Information Architecture. This step was very important for visualizing and organizing the next steps, since many users had different needs and some contradicted others, even risking that the application accumulated too many options and became unnecessarily complex.
Wireflows
To summarize the result of the layout and navigation sketches, I chose for this project to use wireflows (wireframes + user flow), because they better describe some measures taken both in wireframes and in flows. In addition to that, I also separated the flows into four (registration, creation, search and favorites), which are the main functions of the application and can be performed independently. Below are the wireflows and some explanation of each.
Resolutions
challenge #1
Sharing recipes
It is the main purpose of the application, and while sharing, users themselves feed the application, making it more diverse and dynamic. However, to avoid complications, this model requires at least initially one or more "content curators" profiles, who evaluate the quality of what is being published so as not to undermine trust in the application.
challenge #2
Helping amateur cooks
Today the internet has proven to be the escape for many self-taught and amateurs alike, so one of the main goals of the app is to make this task easy for inexperienced users. For this it was important, for example, the step-by-step images and the highlight of the difficulty level.
challenge #3
Practical and pleasant interface
For some users, cooking needs to be a practical and efficient activity. For this, the interface presents linearity in the main functions to find and prepare recipes, for example, through the search tool.
challenge #4
Organizing recipes
Also for greater efficiency, the app helps users to organize their recipes into folders of their own if they want to. This tool also allows searching within the folders and reorganizations.
challenge #5
Recipes for each profile
Although the registration is optional, the login brings some benefits such as the recipes indicated for each user profile, which is assembled according to preferences and evolved according to the use of the app. These recommendations mostly happen on the app's home screen.
Style guide
What I've learned
This was a particularly challenging case study that I put a lot of passion into, as through it I was able to fall in love with cooking a little more and learn more about UX design and some new recipes. Through him I also learned about the importance that desk researchcan bring, as well as put into practice some UX methodologies, such as personas and wireflows.
Despite being just a study, I built it all thinking about a possible application in the market, facing some challenges, such as some tools that would need validation from developers and strategies that would need a helping hand from marketing, confirming once again how a designer must surf between sectors.
Also check out...
