Recipe Road

Recipe Road is a collaborative 24-hour project that made it to the finals of UX SLO Fest. The app aims to gamify and encourage healthy eating habits through weekly planning.

COmpetition Prompt

"Your challenge is to create a mobile or web prototype that aims to address food insecurity, health + dietary considerations, and/or culinary exploration. In addition, your app/website must incorporate an AI-driven feature."

User Interviews

We phoned 13 friends including Cal Poly SLO students, other college students, and young working professionals. We did this in order to identify their priorities in the kitchen, utilization of existing resources, niches they’d like to be filled, and gaps in the market. We synthesized the findings into likes and dislikes, and common themes.

Interview Findings

Likes

Convenience

• All in one package ingredients
• Input ingredients in kitchen and find recipes that use them

Saving Time - making food

• Ability to quickly find ingredient lists after a busy day
• Easy Recipes
• New Recipes

Information/Education aspect

• Learning about nutrients and good
eating habits
• Learning to cook for yourself for the first time

Cultural exploration

• Weekly Suggestions
• Finding fun food events and free
food with friends, not as need- based

Rating System

• Seeing Reviews
• Rate based on healthiness

Visual Appeal

• Photos of recipe
• Easy to scan for information
• Interactive map of resources

Targeted recipe

• Current ingredients
• Dietary restrictions

Dislikes

Real time update on EBT balance

• Card cancellation
• Reject transaction

Exhausting

• Planing/Find meals after
classes/work

Inaccessibility

• Not having ingredients needed
for meals
• Reject transaction

Time Consuming

• Inputing what you ate for the day

Misinformation

• Credibility of diets on social media
• False claims

Misinformation

• Tend to eat same things

Survey

We sent out a survey to 85+ people, 66 of whom are aged 18-24 college-aged group of target users we are designing for.

• 78% of users prefer to cook at home over eating out, when alone

• 62% of users always or almost always eat alone

• 47% of users would like to be eating with others than they currently do

• Only 20% of users feel open to eating with strangers

PAin points from survey

• There are varied feelings from users regarding cooking their next meal; excited, prepared, rushed, and anxious.

• Cooking is time-consuming, too busy

• Find themselves cooking the same few meals repetitively

• Food and groceries are too expensive

Problem Statement

Currently, college students are busy and stressed, hindering them from developing healthy food habits.

Most eat for survival and feel that cooking can be intimidating, time-consuming, and repetitive. This often leads to unhealthy meals or skipped meals.

Target User

College students without much cooking experience looking to expand their culinary horizons.

Sketching → Low Fidelity Prototyping