CookBook
Recipe Listing Mobile App
UX Case Study
Recipe App
Cookbook is a mobile application that helps users discover, save, and organize recipes. It includes features such as ingredient based search, nutritional information, and cooking tips, and aims to make meal planning and preparation easy and enjoyable for users. This UX case study will focus on improving the app's usability and user satisfaction.
Project Overview
This UX case study aims to enhance the user experience of a recipe app designed for home cooks of all levels seeking inspiration and guidance in meal planning and preparation. The app currently offers features such as recipe search, ingredient-based search, saving and organizing, rating, nutritional information, and cooking tips. The project will involve conducting user research to uncover user needs and pain points, creating user personas to represent diverse audience segments, and developing design principles and wireframes to address these insights. Usability testing will be conducted to assess the new design's effectiveness, followed by iterative revisions and testing to ensure the final design maximizes user satisfaction and engagement.
Problem Statement
Many recipe apps fail to deliver a seamless and intuitive user experience, often leaving users frustrated by disorganized interfaces, unclear instructions, and limited personalization options. These shortcomings make it challenging for users to find specific recipes, navigate the app efficiently, and tailor their experience to suit dietary restrictions, preferences, and cooking skills. As a result, users struggle to discover and prepare meals effortlessly, leading to decreased satisfaction and reduced reliance on these apps as a dependable cooking resource.
Solution
Many recipe apps fail to deliver a seamless and intuitive user experience, often leaving users frustrated by disorganized interfaces, unclear instructions, and limited personalization options. These shortcomings make it challenging for users to find specific recipes, navigate the app efficiently, and tailor their experience to suit dietary restrictions, preferences, and cooking skills. As a result, users struggle to discover and prepare meals effortlessly, leading to decreased satisfaction and reduced reliance on these apps as a dependable cooking resource.
Design Thinking
Empathize
Prototype
Test
Research
For the UX case study, I conducted research on recipe apps to gain insights into user preferences and pain points. Our goal was to understand how users interact with recipe apps, what features they value the most, and identify any usability issues that can be addressed.
I started by conducting user surveys and interviews with a diverse group of participants who regularly use recipe apps. During these interviews, I explored their motivations for using recipe apps, their preferred platforms, and the key challenges they face while using these apps.
I also conducted a competitive analysis to evaluate popular recipe apps in the market and identify trends and best practices. By synthesizing the findings from user interviews, competitive analysis, and surveys, I gained valuable insights that will inform the design and development of our recipe app, aiming to create a user-centered and intuitive experience.
Survey
I created a survey and floated to few potential users.
These are few sample questions
- How often do you cook at home?
- Do you use recipe apps or websites to find new recipes?
- What features would you like to see in a recipe app? (e.g. search by ingredient, save favorite recipes, meal planning, create your own recipes, share recipes)
- Do you often search based on the ingredients you have at home?
- If you often search based on the ingredients you have at home, do you get relevant set of recipes that fit your cooking criteria in seconds?
- How important is it to you that a recipe app offers nutritional information?
- Do you prefer recipe apps that offer step-by-step instructions with photos or videos?
- Do you have any dietary restrictions or preferences (e.g. gluten-free, vegetarian, low-carb) that you would like a recipe app to cater to?
- Which age group do you belong to?
- Would you like to have an option to post your recipe publicly on the app?
Survey Result
This is the survey result, I have put few screenshots of the same
Competitive Analysis
Empathy Map
User Personas
User Flow
Information Architecture
Sketches
Wireframes
Mockups
Login & Sign Up
These are the Login, Sign Up, Verification and setting profile screens
For Login/Sign up users can choose between one click login or setting up a password
After sign up user needs to verify his email and set up his profile
Onboarding Questions
Questions asked are:
- Where are you from?
- What is your preferred language?
- Translate Recipe In Your Language
- What Food do you prefer?
- What Cuisines do you like?
Home and Recipes
The home screen has a search bar to search recipes instantly with a filter to narrow down recipes. It has one click filtering tags for quick search. It also has few user preferred recipes with planned recipes for ‘today’.
The Recipe page has video tutorial and written down recipes. It has additional features like:
- Save Recipe To Collection
- Sharing
- Translate Recipe In Your Language
- Cooking Time
- Nutritional Value
- Servings Calculator
- Timer
- Ratings
Search
Search has recent searches categorised based on ingredients and recipes. It has filter for extensive search. The filters are categorised for seamless experience.
It also has an option to exclude the ingredients/preferences.
My Recipe
These are the recipes which user has created. He can search and filter out his own recipes.
User can store all their recipes here and share with others. No need of manual cookbooks now 😍.
Meal Planner
Smart Meal Planner will generate a meal plan for everyday, maintaining user choices and preferences.
There is a recipe randomizer where you can shuffle recipes for a particular meal or can select a specific recipe for that meal.
My Collections
These are saved collections of recipes, for easy surfing and categorization of recipes
