PROXI - Diet-Specific Recipes For You

Domain Problem

Selective eaters cannot find appropriate recipes to accommodate their diets, while being able to comfortably and safely try out new foods.

Research Insights

Through our research, we found that people find it hard to modify existing recipes for dietary needs. This, together with the stress of finding restaurants and foods that a selective eater can find, lead to a lower quality of life. These eaters struggle to find acceptable food, potentially not eating at all or excessively meal planning.

Article 1: Identifying Ingredient Substitutions Using a Knowledge Graph of Food Article 2: Study sheds light on the consequences of picky eating in college students

Value Proposition

Through the use of our application, we hope to create value for our users by allowing them to:

1. Easily find diet-specific recipes, reducing the complexity of finding appropriate foods and overcoming their reluctance of cooking for themselves
2. Avoid the uncertainty of success for alternative ingredients they've found themselves, which may not be suitable for their recipes
3. Feel encouraged and positive towards trying out new ingredients, recipes, and cuisines

Considerations

We kept a few different things in mind when developing our solution. Since we had lots of friends and family with dietary restrictions, we needed to make the app as simple and accessible as possible, while also giving more advanced users the ease of use they expect.

We also considered a few different use-cases that users would have for the application and when they would use it, developing two crucial use-cases: 1) when the user is planning future meals, and 2) when the user needs an ingredient substituted last minute. Thus, the application we created allows for users to save and browse meals, but also has a function for users to search for ingredient substitutions separate from the recipe catalog.

Target Users

Young Adults (20-29 years)

"Poor dietary behaviour are of particular concern for young adults...The barriers experienced by young adults making different food choices can be driven by life stage changes."

Source

Context

People within this target segment have developed and acquired tastes throughout their adolescence, while still being open-minded towards trying new foods. With the many large life stage changes happening, such as moving out, starting university, and starting their career, they have a newfound freedom in their food choices. With freedom also comes responsibility, as they must take charge of their own health, beginning to think more about their diet and meal planning.

Common Goals & Activities

Some common goals in this segment are discovering dishes, feeling comfortable with their diet, and having control over their food choices while saving money. Common activities including cooking at home, socializing over food (eating at restaurants), and meal-prepping for the week.

Challenges & Opportunities

Some challenges that arise due to these unique circumstances are difficulty of finding suitable recipes for their specific diet, not wanting to try new foods due to inconvenience or intolerances, and finding that suitable foods may be hard to find or expensive.

Viability

Given that users in this segment are more comfortable with technology and use smartphones heavily, creating a mobile application is the most feasible platform for our application. In the future, we may want to consider creating a web-accessible version for tablets and PCs.

The 7 Week Process

From ideation, brainstorming, sketches, storyboarding, user testing, to prototyping

Initial Sketches

Sketches of our two most important pages, which are the recipe listing and search filters page

Storyboard

Mockups

First Mockups

A collection of mockups we created to figure out our user tasks and key interactions

User Testing

We completed user testing with several individuals within our target user segment.

Our process plan was as follows:
1. User performs tasks through the main flow of the app while thinking aloud
2. User is asked a number of open-ended questions about their experience
3. The collected positive/negative feedback, improvements, and feelings are analyzed and categorized into patterns.

Through this process, we were able to gather a lot of valuable feedback on not only our interface, but also the testing process. Our participants were overwhelmingly positive about the potential impact of this project, citing its' clean and intuitive interface and high future use potential.