In the demanding environment we live in, preparing meals at home can often be quite challenging, from finding recipes, to organizing pantry items and managing grocery shopping. The vision of Chef Capp was to help individuals overcome these everyday obstacles, and to empower the home cook.
This self-initiated project involved a team of 4, including a product designer, front-end developer, back-end developer, and myself as a UI/UX designer/developer.
Designing the right thing
Chef Capp was born out of my frustrations with cooking at home. After conversations with friends and family, I realized I was not alone.
Once I formed a team of like-minded individuals to address these common home cooking problems, I listed some hypotheses, listed below. These are based on my own experiences and observations of friends and family over the years, but they needed validation beyond my social bubble.
Problem hypotheses
- Recipe fragmentation: Users often struggle with scattered recipes across various platforms, making it challenging to find, organize, and follow recipes seamlessly.
- Inefficient meal planning: Planning meals becomes a hassle due to the lack of tools that consider dietary preferences, portion adjustments, and available ingredients.
- Pantry mismanagement: Difficulty in keeping track of pantry items leads to duplicated purchases, forgotten ingredients, and food wastage due to items expiring or going bad.
- Grocery shopping challenges: Shopping becomes time-consuming and disorganized without guidance on what to buy or when certain ingredients are needed.
- Limited context in cooking apps: Existing cooking apps primarily focus on recipes without addressing the broader cooking experience, neglecting aspects like efficient ingredient use and meal consumption timing.
- Health-conscious dilemmas: Individuals striving for healthier eating habits often lack guidance or tools to make informed choices regarding recipes and ingredient substitutes.
User research plan
Upon aligning on the problem hypotheses, we crafted a survey to collect quantitative data on the prevalence and severity of the hypothesized problems. In other words, we wanted to confidently answer the questions:
- How frequent do home cooks experience each problem?
- How much pain does each problem cause?
This would help us both validate some of our hypotheses, but also get a pulse on which problems are the most painful and most common, which would help us prioritize which problems to solve for in an MVP.
Additionally, we developed an interview guide to gather qualitative insights on the home cooking experience that a survey cannot capture. Through interviewing participants, we wanted to capture the more nuanced nature of home cooking and answer the questions:
- What home cooking problem is most top of mind?
- How are people currently overcoming the challenges?
- Have we missed any hypotheses?
Research insights
Through a combination of our team’s networks and organic social media traffic, we had over 800 survey responses from all over the world and interviewed 5 people.
How enthusiastically strangers took to our survey in particular was a welcome surprise. Through both the interviews and the survey responses, we learned that people are indeed frustrated with the current solutions available.
This was proof that the problem we identified is popular and frequent – an excellent startup project.
Our user research, based on extensive survey responses, illuminated critical pain points prevalent among home cooks. Here are some highlights from our research:
We discovered that 4 of the 5 top challenges identified by the survey participants aligned with the core problems to address:
- Spoilt food and wastage: While an app cannot prevent food from going bad, a potential solution is to notify users of ingredients and cooked meals that are approaching expiry dates and suggest recipes based on that information.
- Inconvenience: While cooking at home will never quite be as convenient as ordering in or dining out, potential solutions are auto-generating shopping lists and smart recipe suggestions based on user preferences.
- Keeping track of food inventory: We envisioned a solution that automatically updates the user's inventory of ingredients and cooked meals as the user grocery shops and cook meals.
- Don't know what to cook: A potential solution is to help the user meal plan by guiding the user considering nutritional value, what's in their current inventory, who they are cooking for, and what they need to shop for
The top frustrations relating to the current tech solutions on the market are also identified by the survey participants. These also closely aligned with the core problems to address:
- Too much fluff: This refers to the ever growing pre-ambles and back-stories being placed before the actual recipe. We imagine Chef Capp with a no-nonsense principle of showing every recipe in a standardized and direct format
- Missing ingredients in recipes: This refers to the fact that when a home cook opens a recipe with motivation to cook it, they will find that they actually cannot because they don't have all the ingredients. We imagine Chef Capp with a robust database of ingredients and their feasible substitutes, so that we could help people cook the recipes they want without buying specific ingredients unnecessarily
- Too many recipes: This refers to the simple overwhelm that the search engine returns whenever a home cook might search for a recipe. We imagine Chef Capp to carefully curate a list of reliable recipes, quality assured by kitchen testing by the Chef Capp team. Our recipe database would prioritize quality over quantity.
Our survey results also supported that even without our guidance there was a good amount of meal planning being done by home cooks.
These insights were instrumental in guiding our design process, focusing on addressing the most prevalent pain points while streamlining the user experience.
Designing the thing right
Looking at the problems we had identified and validated in our research phase. We started expanding the idea by expanding on the functionality and features the app would need. Laying out these features as parts of activities in a user story map. Our user story map gave us a vision of what the complete app would look like.
The information architecture stemmed from a fusion of survey-derived data and collaborative discussions within the team. Features were intuitively and technically interlinked to ensure a seamless user journey through the app.
In crafting Chef Capp, we methodically prioritized features based on their potential to alleviate the identified common problems. To achieve our Minimal Viable Product (MVP) goal, we refined these features to the bare essentials.
Post-MVP, we charted a roadmap for additional features, aligning them with our long-term vision for the app's evolution.
Wireframing
We looked at each user flow and started turning them into wireframes. We looked at existing cooking platforms and existing design patterns for standard features like user on-boarding, authentication and navigation. For features that would have been unique to Chef Capp like our inventory management and cooking substitution system, we imagined unique flows that we would later run user tests for and iterate.
Mockups
To streamline the our design process, we decided to use Google's Material Design as the underlying design system for our app.
This meant we could focus our efforts on the non-standard parts of the app while utilizing the Material Design System to handle common interaction components. Utilizing Material Design would also have the added benefit of being simple to implement in Google's front-end framework Flutter.
For development, we chose Flutter as our front-end framework and Firebase as our backend framework. We currently have a functioning UI, Navigation and Database. In parallel, we are also creating content for the platform by creating recipes, cooking them and photographing them in preparation for populating the database.We also have many future ideas for Chef Capp, such as partnering up with grocery stores to enable in-app shopping.
Current day
Sadly this project was put on hiatus due to personal-life matters of the team taking priority. Eventually we unanimously agreed to disband the project to prioritize other pursuits.
The source files have been made public on my GitHub should you choose to take a look or use any of our work.
