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TASTE OF THE PAST

A sentimental recipe app created to highlight the importance of family heritage, culture, and traditions. This app allows users to connect with family and friends by sharing passed down recipes. 

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Research

As researchers designing and developing a new app, it’s important to understand who the target users would be and get to know their thoughts and feelings on how they would interact with the app. Research began with our team of 5 creating a proto persona and competitor analysis to kick start the new project. The competitor analysis was broken down into two direct competitors (online recipe books) and two indirect competitors (family photo sharing) in which the SWOT method was used to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of those competitors. Next we conducted 5 user interviews and a survey in which 68 people completed.

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Affinity Diagram.png
User Persona (1).png
Empathy Map (1).png

Definition

Problem Statement

We believe the importance of heritage and family memories is critical to many people. We strive to embody this connection by developing a sentimental recipe app that brings families and friends together through the food they make and memories they share. 

Value Proposition

"Preserving Memories Through Food"

Ideation

During this phase, we created a storyboard with our user persona in mind. Next we created a user flow to help guide us when creating our frames. To wrap up this section, we designed a style guide to create a clear and cohesive way to reflect our vision for the app design.

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User Flow.png

Prototyping and Testing

To begin the prototyping phase, our group sketched some frames and began bouncing ideas off of each other. Based on our research we wanted to include some key features such as the ability to upload pictures, share comments, join multiple books, and overall have a way for memories not to be forgotten. Next we conducted interviews to test the usability.

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Testing Key Insights

  • Some hesitancy finding the comment section; wording slightly confusing
     

  • Users wanted to enlarge image by clicking directly on the image, not the magnifying glass icon; magnifying glass icon too small
     

  • Some users missed the notification due to to the color choice being green

For the A/B testing portion we wanted to know the user’s preference on the location and the design of the “add recipe” button. We initially completed our testing and our findings were inconclusive due to the close percentages on preferences. We extended our timeframe and with a total of 18 responses we remained inconclusive. As a team we made a unanimous decision to implement option B to ensure we maintained a cohesive style as demonstrated throughout our style guide and entire app.

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A

B

For the high-fidelity prototype, we created 19 frames by incorporating all of the feedback we learned from testing. We also created a web version of the app. We followed the storyboard using Marisol's experiences and believe we designed the perfect sentimental recipe app.  High Fidelity Prototype Figma

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Conclusion

After 3 weeks our project had come to an end. We designed a mobile and desktop version along with coding the desktop version using JavaScript, CSS, and Bootstrap. We enjoyed working on this project as a team and learned a lot along the way. Listed below are a few future opportunities for the Taste of the Past app.

  • Create and code more desktop pages to link to google analytics and measure success
     

  • Enable users to share recipes either publicly or privately with general population
     

  • Create a feature that transcribes handwritten recipes into a digital form

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