Easy Recipe is a web app that lets users find recipes, inspiration, and cooking tips. Cooking should be fun and easy!
I conducted user research interviews to learn what the users’ wants, needs, desires, and pain points were when using recipe web apps.
This helped me establish a direction for the recipe web app and to focus on the features that the users found important.
The users want no long intro about the author's personal life.
The users want a clear visual separation of content.
The users use Google to search "recipe name + ingredients".
The users use online recipes for inspiration, and because it provides multiple solutions.
The users look at their fridge before deciding on a recipe.
2/3 of users turn off “sleep mode” on their phones when following the recipe.
Find cooking inspiration.
Learn to prepare or season certain ingredients.
Prepare a shopping list.
Follow cooking instructions.
Find recipe ideas that let them clean out their fridge.
“Every section is clearly separated and that is nice when you are looking for something for the first time”
“The instructions should not be written in long paragraphs of text”
“You don’t want a long text before the ingredients list”
Based on the user research, I created three personas to help me stay focused on designing with a specific user in mind.
I created an MVP document, which contained the most important Jobs to Be Done. These helped me focus on the most essential features and provided me with tasks I could ask the users to complete during the user testing phase.
When I must cook food, I want to find recipes with an ingredients list and cooking instructions, so I can shop and cook a specific recipe.
When I follow a recipe, I want to easily be able to read and understand the content, so I can cook it with little effort.
When looking for a recipe, I want to see the ratings, so I can trust the quality of the recipe.
When I am looking for things to cook for dinner, I want to be able to find recipes that are easy to cook and shop for, so I can prepare delicious food for my family while not spending a disproportionate amount of energy or time on it.
Next, I created a user flow diagram to visualize the user’s navigation around the web app.
I turned the paper wireframes into digital wireframes which I could prototype and use for user testing in the next step of the process.
I got valuable feedback from the usability testing, which I implemented into the next iteration of the recipe web app. Now it was time to make preference testing to see which headline style the users preferred.
With the feedback from the preference test, I could move further and begin to solidify the style guide.
As a final step, I finalized the screens and made them pixel-perfect before turning them into mockups.
