Have you ever had a moment of not knowing what to make with the ingredients you have at home? Meal Master is a recipe by ingredients app that offers culinary recipes based off the ingredients specified by the user.
This project was created as a semester project in IAD 3000. The purpose of the project was to create a project based on the process of Goal-Directed Design. The project took seven weeks to complete and it was completed by myself and four other teammates.
Meal Master is a great way to learn new recipes, keep track of recipes, and save money. The purpose of this app was to craft recipes form the food that people have available in their kitchen. The way the app would work is the user inputs the ingredients and any dietary preferences and it will output possible recipes and possible other ingredients you may need.
The app has four sections: the profile, search and input, recipes list, and grocery list. The profile allows you to customize settings and view your resent recipes and cookbook. The search and input section allows you to insert the ingredients and receive recipes. From there, you can save those recipes in the cookbook for later use, or you can get suggestions for other groceries in the grocery section. The grocery section allows the user to search new ingredients for groceries. The app will search nearby grocery stores and calculate the final price for the list.
In the kickoff meeting, the general details about the app are discussed. It is the first meeting the designers get with the stakeholders. The purpose is to discuss what is needed from the app before anything else happens. It is important to note that our team didn't have stakeholders or clients so we used the opportunity to discuss what we wanted out of our app.
Very similar to the kickoff meeting, the stakeholder interviews are another opportunity for the design team to get more information form stakeholders. Possible monetary gain and business interests are usually discussed in this meeting.
The competitive audit is research on competitors and similar apps and websites. The purpose of this is to determine why some products succeed and some do not. We do not want to be too different from other popular software. We found five applications to analyze. The five applications were: SuperCook, Allrecipes Dinner Spinner, BigOven, Epicurious, and Tasty. We compared them by organizing them on a chart by purpose, strengths, weaknesses, product pricing, social media facts, and brand footprint.
The literature review is research done on everything that does not have to do with competitors or other applications. We researched how we could make money from the app, how much the app would cost, means of production, and market research to understand the important business aspects of the application.
User interviews were conducted to gain insight from potential customers. A series of question were asked to the interviewees to gain insight on their dietary habits and needs. We narrowed the data we got from them to formulate four user personas. The first one is users that have little time. Many users do not have much time to shop and cook for themselves so they find themselves eating out frequently. The second is users on a budget. Many users need to eat on a budget. The third is varying levels of experience. Many users do not know how to cook or are very inexperienced. The last is users with dietary needs. Some users have allergies or are on a special diet. We took these into consideration for the rest of the process.
The modeling phase is all about creating a primary persona based on the data acquired and analyzed from the user interviews. We created affinity maps that mapped out reoccurring behaviors. We mapped out the data on scales based on the behaviors on the affinity maps. From this data, we created the primary persona on the right.
This is Anna Barnes. She is 22 years old, a student, an intermediate at cooking, but loves to cook. Her goals for this app are to be able to: find recipes with ingredients at home, save money, not waste food at home, save time by looking at saved recipes.
The requirements stage deals with brainstorming everything the app needs before the prototyping begins. The requirements are the data and functional needs of the persona. There are five steps involved: creating a problem and vision statement, exploring and brainstorming, identify persona expectations, construct context scenarios, and identify design requirements.
The framework stage deals with the wireframing of the app. Week took about two weeks to wireframe the app. Our wireframe can be seen to the right. Our team divided up the work into sections and tried to work together as much as possible.
We are all very proud of what we created. We enjoyed every step of the process. Goal-directed design is a very in-depth and descriptive design process. It is very effective and it was a lot of fun to implement.