Cook Pronto

Team Size: 3 | Jan'15 - Apr'15 | View project on Github


Motivation

Many people like students staying away from home, working professionals may not be proficient cooks. Often, they turn up late at home after work, and may want to grab something easy to cook. Even those adept at cooking, may have a handful of ingredients at home and often find themselves in the dilemma of what best can be made out of it. Then there are some of us, who are allergic to certain ingredients, or want to only have healthy food.

Solution

One thing common to above all the problems, is the shortage of choices due to a lack of knowledge of the perfect recipe to suit our needs. We realized what people really need is an easy access to recipes, that not just provide an eclectic variety of recipes, but helps user get the perfect recipe based on his/her preferences. This is what brought us to the idea of an ingredient based recipe search app, Cook Pronto!

Features

Iterations

Coming up with the final app required several iterations of user feedback, prototyping and execution.

  1. Contextual Enquiry, Surveys, Personal Interviews

    2. We began collecting data from a variety of users comprising working professionals, students, homemakers (in age group 18-50 years), to understand:
    1. What food they prefer?
    2. How often they cook? How much time do they have for cooking?
    3. What is their cooking schedule?
    4. How often do they search recipes on the internet? What device do they use for the same?
    5. To what extent does the app/website that they use for recipes looks easy while operating?
    6. How often do they get desired/correct results from the app?

    Fig 1: A subset of questions asked from users, and analysis of user feedback

    The analysis of the data helped us zero down on user behavior and their major requirements:
    1. Almost 70% of the people rated themselves 1-3 for proficiency in cooking on a scale of 1-5.
    2. Majority of the people cooked food at the night.
    3. 70% people have less than 15 minutes for cooking in morning.
    4. 73% of the people prefer to cook their meals within 30 minutes at any given time of the day.
    5. 74% people rated the existing food apps 1-3 on ease of operability on a scale of 1-5.
    6. 76% people rated the food apps 1-3 on providing the desired results on a scale of 1-5.

  2. Affinity Diagrams

    3. We summarized the major problems, key findings in affinity diagram.


  3. Lo-Fi and Hi-Fi Prototyping

    4. The data collection helped us identify the key features of the app:
    1. Recipe Search based on name
    2. Recipe Search based on ingredients
    3. Option to set preferences for vegetarian, non-vegetarian food, avoiding certain ingredients


    This gave rise to Lo-Fi prototypes which were revised to finally give rise to the Hi-Fi prototypes. Tasks analysis and thinking aloud helped us revise the Home Page to divide all the recipes into four popular categories:
    1. Busy Bee – Easy and quick recipes for people short of time
    2. Healthy Pick – Low calorie, high nutrition recipes
    3. Dinner Delight – Recipes cooked in dinner (Surveys revelaed that of all the meals, dinner is most likely cooked at home)
    4. Snacky Eve – Light, easy to cook snacks for evening


  4. Design Patterns

    5. The app also took care of major Design Patterns:
    1. Site Branding : The name of the app is on every activity.
    2. Above the fold : Most important information on a page is kept above the fold so that user doesn’t have to scroll
    3. Bread crumbs : Every page shows where the user is present in the app, i.e., the path starting from the Home page
    4. High visibility action buttons : All the click buttons to proceed to the next activity are of the same color green. Cancel button is of color yellow.
    5. Fitt’s Law : All the buttons obey the Fitt’s Law. They are of large enough size to be visible and are intuitive. Moreover, there is enough spacing between buttons of opposite functionality such as ‘Save’, ‘Cancel’, to allow ease of click to the user.

Existing Alternative

We compared our app with an existing Food App, ‘All The Cooks’ and present a detailed evaluation of the same.


Future Work

  1. Increase the database of recipes.
  2. Provide option to upload, compose recipes.
  3. Option to save user’s favorite recipes, to easily locate them next time they use the app.