Problem
Online recipes are often buried under lengthy blogs, irrelevant anecdotes, and distracting material. Users, especially those pressed for time, find this frustrating and cumbersome while trying to prepare their meals.
Significance
Cooking is about more than just food—it’s about joy, creativity, and building community with friends and family. By enhancing the recipe discovery and usage experience, we can encourage users to create meaningful memories and explore new culinary possibilities.
Goals and Objectives
Key Goals
Make recipe discovery and usage a seamless, distraction-free experience.
Ensure accessibility across all levels of technology literacy.
Research
Survey
I surveyed 16 of my friends, family, and classmates to understand their needs, desires, and pain points when using online recipes.
Key Research Insights:
Users overwhelmingly dislike scrolling through long recipe blogs.
Photos and videos are valued highly when following recipes.
People mostly use their phones to find recipes, however, cookbooks are also frequently used.
The ability to organize and customize recipes is to be desired.
Users can locate and follow recipes quickly and intuitively.
High user engagement and positive feedback from a diverse user spectrum.
Increased willingness among users to explore and share new recipes.
Ideation
How Might We Brainstorming
User Journey Flow Charts
Target Audience:
This solution caters to a diverse group, including:
Novice to highly experienced cooks
Individuals with varying levels of tech literacy, from beginners to savvy users
Busy individuals looking to cook for themselves or large parties
Defining Success
Preliminary Sketches
Soloution
Wrap-Up and Takeaways
What I Learned
Before the interviews, I had incorrect assumptions about user behavior. I didn’t think people still relied on paper recipes or cookbooks to discover new dishes. However, after discussing recipe preferences with users, I realized traditional recipe sharing remains deeply valued. This insight felt special, so I incorporated an "upload personal recipe" feature to make Bite Size a home for all recipes, both digital and handwritten.
Future Directions
With more time, I would:
Conduct extensive user testing to validate designs.
Explore personalization options, such as saving favorite recipes or dietary preference filters.
Add a feature that allows users to discover recipes based on specific ingredients, or leftovers from previous recipes
Onboarding
In order for people to save and reference the recipes they like, I allowed users to create an account that they can return to. For the onboarding experience I also included bright and inviting CTAs with colorful photos of food to get users excited about getting in the kitchen.
Shorten & Save
Once logged into Bite Size, users can shorten any online recipe by pasting a link from social media or a recipe site into the URL bar and clicking “Shorten.” They’ll then see the condensed recipe and can save it to be used again.
Saved recipes offer quick access to ingredients, directions, and personal notes. Users can browse a photo gallery of the original recipe and even edit ingredients, portion sizes, and instructions to suit their preferences.
Organize
After saving and editing their recipes, users can organize them using folders. Folders are used to store multiple recipes of the same category. Users can search their folders for specific recipes or scroll through all the recipes they have saved. Users can also edit folders, delete recipes from their folders, or delete folders altogether.
Adding Personal Recipes
Through conversations with survey participants, I discovered that while online recipes were the most common source for discovering new dishes, many users still valued reusing family recipes and trusted cookbook favorites they considered tried and true. To accommodate these preferences, I included the option for users to upload personal recipes. These could be scanned directly from a cookbook, added by uploading handwritten notes, or manually typed into the platform.