Since the beginning of the pandemic, people's diet habit has been changed due to the restrictions on fresh food access and take-out food. The number of people start daily cooking at home.  According to HUNTER's poll, more than 54% of people reported cooking more and 51% said they will continue to do so when the pandemic is over.

The way we eat is changing, meal prep has gained its hype in recent years and seems to become the logical solution to many people now with its promise of efficiency and potential money and time savings.

Based on this background and trend, we try to help people meal prep more efficiency. The first thing we have to do is to investigate the audience and their cooking experience and eating habits. We set our research to people up in the age group of 18-50 who might the main group of people cook at home.
Some of them are housewives who have been cooking at home for years, and some are office workers and school students who have started cooking at home because of the pandemic or other reasons.

The research data through in-depth understanding of their cooking habits, include the average times of weekly cooking,  the duration of the cooking, and the habits of cooking to find their pain points and needs.

Pain Points:
Cooking is time-consuming  --->Less Time
Stock up more groceries food leads to challenge how to keep it fresh and avoid food wastage  --->Less Costs
The health-conscious want to find an easier way to balance them all   --->Less Efforts

Needs:
People are looking for more personalized recipes--->Personalized
People are cooking for healthier with the recipes designed to use ingredients on hand --->Efficiency
People are cooking inspiration at home no matter their cooking levels -->Inspiration

In the research process, we found that among all the keywords of pain points and needs, efficiency was the most frequently mentioned by users.

In fact, efficiency could mean different things to different people, but the bottom line is they don’t want to spend too much time and money making their weekday meals no matter if they work from home or in an office.

So what kind of efficiency does users really need? Is it a personalized recommendation recipe or one-click customized food preparation? We asked ourselves, with so many recipe apps on the market, where is our advantage? How to bring unique value to users?

Actually, we found that people still have various pain points with online grocery shopping due to the high delivery fees, and inability to see fresh ingredients etc even we thought that their might be trend more for online shopping due to the covid contactless issue.

So what if we help users solve the problem of efficiency meal prepartion based on the ingredients that they already have?

Generally speaking, when we talk about efficiency, the first thing we think of is how to shorten the cooking time.  Therefore, we will recommend more quick & easy recipes to users based on their preferences to help them shorten the cooking time.

And on this basis, we are thinking about whether we can add a new feature, cook based on the existing ingredients. That mainly because we found sometimes after purchase people will not cook or forget cook these ingredients so that the ingredients will rot and throw away.  While the recommendation recipes based on the ingredients in the refrigerator,  it not only improves the efficiency, but also help to reduce waste, because not waste is the one kind of save money.

From the information architecture& main flow to high-fidelity, we have been in constant iteration. On the main flow, we condensed the button bar to “Home”, “My Fridge”, “Profile”.  We define the "home" page as the recipe recommendation and exploration. These recipe recommendations could be based on the “favorite cuisine”,  or the “based on what I have” that users existing ingredients. For recipe exploration is more about the general exploration, like “cuisine” or “goal”.
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The user explores the needs of recipes through these personalized settings. Because our goal is to help users cook efficiently, we try to make the whole process more convenient in the interactive interface process of the recipe. Therefore, on the screen of the recipe instruction, we have done many version update iterations.

Take the interface of instructions for instance. When users enter the “Instructions”, we assume that they have selected the recipe and entered the stage of cooking. At this stage, users are most concerned about usability and ease of use. After several iterations, we finally decided to show the content of the recipe in the form of steps marks+ illustrations+ text. One of the reasons is because in our interview, users mentioned that they want the recipe format to be displayed in the form of pictures so they can easily follow the process of cooking.

The “Start Cooking” button was finally decided to be placed at the bottom of the page because we assumed that the user would preview the content of the recipe before actually starting to follow the recipe steps.