Pantry Solutions is an app that allows users to take a picture of their fridge and pantry, manually input ingredients, or scan their grocery receipts to receive a recipe with those ingredients. This was a team project with the goal to create an app that prioritizes the most useful features through user research, to compete in a saturated market.
Many people struggle to find something to cook with ingredients available to them at home, and look towards technology to help them make decisions (ie. searching recipes, downloading recipe apps, etc.). Through research we found that competitor’s apps did not offer certain features users wanted, so we sought to create an app that would focus on the user’s needs in a recipe app.
We started with a competitive and comparative analysis. We discussed multiple app’s strengths and weaknesses and compared features. Downloading and testing similar apps allowed us to see which features that we may want to implement in ours and which features were underwhelming.
After analyzing our findings, we then performed a think-aloud usability test on one of the competitor’s app: Paprika Recipe Manager
A survey was sent to participants with questions of how important certain features would be to them in the app. Some competitors offered third party grocery delivery and I decided to remove it as a feature after indecisiveness from survey participants and the addition of this feature may take away from the primary function of the app.
The concept of this application would be important to them in helping choose meals.
It is important that this app is able to take pictures of ingredients and recognize them.
It is important that this app offers a feature to buy & get ingredients delivered.
It important to be able to set dietary filters in choosing recipes.
To further understand the user’s motivations for using the app, I conducted an interview and used this feedback to help construct the information architecture.
Defining critical categories such as Design, Features & Functions, Content, Users, Stakeholders, and Technology.
User Flow of finding recipes with ingredients they have in their pantry.
We recruited a user in our target audience to test a prototype to identify pain points in an early version of the design and to better under how a user interacted with the design. I conducted a Think Aloud Protocol with a Task Analysis and recorded the user as they completed their task.
Time to complete tasks: 3:27
Errors:
I created a better onboarding experience and more intuitive user interaction of adding ingredients. A bottom menu bar was added to replace the slide out hamburger menu to ease a pain point of the user always needing to go back to the menu to remember what is available to do within the app.
