Quisines: Simple and Healthy Recipes
Written by Johanna Ebel and Sana Farooq
Quisines is a recipe application that can be used on both Android and IOS. The main purpose of Quisines is to provide users with delicious recipes from different cultures. By doing so, we hope to:
- Simplify decisions on what to cook
- Widen people’s skills in cooking at home
- Contribute to a healthier lifestyle
- Make cooking a fun, educational and easy experience
Our target audience is not limited to any specific group of users. Anyone who is interested in learning new recipes is welcome to use this application.
The UX Research Process
As a NGO our goal is to serve communities and make people’s lives easier. Therefore we have to be conscious about what people really need. A great way of doing this is to conduct user research and be as close as possible to the potential future user. By using a qualitative approach in our user research, we had the chance to interview people from all different backgrounds and understand what they needed in order to make their lives a bit easier when it comes to cooking.
Unsurprisingly, food is a central aspect of everyone’s daily lives and can be quite time consuming. You need to buy ingredients, prepare your ingredients, cook your meal and clean the kitchen. The last thing you want is to spend your time on making a decision on what you want to eat and how you are going to cook that meal. The results from our user research showed that people often struggled figuring out what to cook and how to find recipes both in written and video format. Some participants also agreed that a way of planning meals beforehand and creating a shopping list within the same interface as having the recipes, would reduce a lot of time.
“I like cooking and many times I prefer to use video recipes. I’ve also found it hard to make a meal plan because it requires so much work and I just don’t have the time.” -Kelly
Kelly was one of our participants testing Quisines. Like many millennials, she is working full-time and does not have time to waste on figuring out what to cook. She strives for a healthy lifestyle. When we asked Kelly what she would like to see in a food related app she pointed out that she would like to see an application which makes food planning, cooking and organizing easier so she could plan ahead so she can spend time on other activities like going out or spending time with friends. From her experience, she hasn’t come across an app that can help her create a shopping list, plan meals ahead of time, and look up easy recipes all in one place.
Having gained great insight on what future users wanted to see in our application, the development team started to work on Quisines and eventually published it in September for the wider public. You can download it on iOS (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quisines/id1578552563) and android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.comidaforfamilias.quisine).
Shortly after Quisines was published we began usability research in order to discover potential bugs and get more insights on the user experience. We used a qualitative approach interviewing 5 people and got an insight on what they want to see in the future and what could be improved.
Future work on this app includes further user testing through a quantitative approach (i.e. surveys) to iterate improvements.
If you wish to support the development of this application, or other Comida For Familias apps and web services, comment and share this article with your familia and join our ux research and design communities.
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