My Design Idea
Cooking is an art. Rightly said. It is not everyone’s cup of tea. Cooking is very important because food is one of the biggest aspects of culture. However, cooking can be time-consuming and very difficult when you are working and get very less time to cook on a daily basis.
I am a working woman and almost work 10 hours a day. It takes me two hours to travel to and fro to my workplace. I used to get very less time to cook and couldn’t eat out daily. I wanted to find a way to cook easy recipes within a very short span of time and used to look at various cooking apps. The problem with these apps was that I couldn’t pick and choose the ingredients I had at home I rather had to go and buy ingredients and which was even more tedious after coming back home.
This was the point when I decided to come up with Easy cook app. Easy cook app helps you cook quickly with ingredients you have at home. I came up with a very simple interface to keep it user-friendly. The app has a powerful search to allow users to search or enter ingredients and presents the users with a list of recipes based on the ingredients chosen. The users can drill into the recipes and take a look at detailed recipes.
My Design Iteration
I came up with the app designs and shared it with various users for user testing. There were few in-person feedback, few user testing done by peers online and random surveys. The feedback given was the app looks simple and is easy to use which was encouraging. Some of the other feedback given was initially entering the ingredients was very messy and difficult to understand. Some users found it very confusing and suggested to have search alone. The latest design was enhanced to have a powerful search allowing the users to search and add the ingredients quickly and reduce the confusion. Some of the users found the latest designs neat and simple to use.
The designs evolved over time. There were a lot of iterations to make it better. There other parts of the app that was improved were to have a guest login and not force users to sign up, show a tip of the day etc.
The first iteration of the ingredient adding screen looked like the one below.
Some Screenshots
What is unique about this app
This app is very unique because of the idea of not presenting to the users with recipes just like other apps but it allows users to enter the ingredients they have at home and find related recipes that make their life easy. The app also provides recipes that can be prepared within a very short span of time because the aim of the app is to make users spend less time cooking in their busy schedule and yet cook themselves to stay healthy.