User Research
Directed storytelling on 17 people at Strip District in Pittsburgh to investigate grocery shopping behaviors related to recipes and to gain a better understanding of how people use recipes in their daily lives. The findings were "Recipes are for sharing", "Recipes give people ideas", "Recipes are frequently customized."
Competitive analysis over the 2007 comScore Media Metrix report for 160 online food and recipe products. Existing customers are mostly under 30 and on average spend 8 minutes per visit. The best designed websites have emphasized seasonal ideas on recipes, categorized favorites, keeping notes for recipes, rating and discussion on recipes.
Brick and Mortar analysis to gain better understanding in how recipes were organized within cookbooks was done in Barns and noble. By looking at the types of cookbooks and the marketing strategies employed by bookstores learned more about the needs and motivations of users. Our findings are large page margins for notes and variety of pictures.
Synthesis
Mood Board to capture the feelings and emotions which we observed during face-to-face interviews and brick-and-mortar analysis. The mood board helped us begin to think about the design language we wanted our website to included.
Target Users and Persona to reach to the focus group, love to cook and share their experience with others. Cooking Connection is designed for use by "foodies" who regularly meet to socialize over food. These groups might meet for a special occasion or a cooking theme may provide motivation to gather.
Mental Models for our Sarah, our persona, the steps of her decision making process for a preliminary scenario. In this preliminary scenario, Sarah was choosing a birthday cake from our website for her friend Allison's birthday.
Design
Scenarios to feature recipe sharing, recipe notes, and finding recipes. It also shows how a group would use the site to coordinate events. The goal is to show that with the recipe set, our persona leaves Cooking Connection and gets back to some errands that she had started that morning.
Wireframe to developing the interaction and interface for Cooking Connection was an iterative process involving many rounds of sketching and wireframe development. The scenario is outlined as an invitation application, providing guests the opportunity to volunteer to bring a dish to the event.
Navigation Map
"Featured Recipes" offer featured recipes throughout various stages in the site. These recipes offer highly rated or seasonal recipes to the user and promote the explorative side of cooking. "Saved Recipes" give the option of saving recipes to and maintaining their own personal recipe collection. "Search" specific keywords the user is looking for, the most efficient method of locating a recipe is probably through keyword search. "Browse" the user's personal favorite tags or through the main site navigation which is managed through the popularity of various tags.
Website Prototype (click for demo)
Script (Read with demo)
There are several key themes of our design which differentiate it from current recipe websites. We feel these themes address the needs and motivations of many users which are not being met by today's websites.
Culinary event planning: Support planning social events involving food. Users can use comments to discuss events or recipes. They can also rate recipes and write notes on ingredients or cooking directions.
Recipe sharing and collaboration: Users can share recipes they find with their groups with shares notes within recipes. This allows people to make collaborative notes about ingredients or directions for a recipe.
A community of cooking groups At its heart, Cooking Connection is a social network for people who cook or eat together. We discovered that the root motivations for selecting recipes are social in nature, learning about food and like to share recipe insights when they gather.
Organization through tagging: We discovered recipe categories do not belong to a strict hierarchy we designed categories on Cooking Connection to be created from user tags. These tags give Cooking Connection an organic, community-driven feel.
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