Recipe Hat Case Study

Updated: Jan 31, 2022

Recipe Hat

Part 01. Overview

This case study is based on homework for a job application. Here's the prompt:

Design a cooking app for friends and family who are living separately. They should be able to share and follow along with recipes while cooking together across their different households.

After careful research and going through my design process I came up with “Recipe Hat”. A cooking app where one can find multiple recipes of based on their preference and cook alongside their friends or loved ones regardless of the physical locations. Recipe Hat also functions as a grocery order and delivery service to take out the pain of grocery shopping and to ensure only the right ingredients are used in the preparation of meals using the recipes provided on the app.

Part 02. Research

I started this project by performing brief preliminary research. I did this by first conducting a competitive analysis to see what the other products in the space have to offer. There are a couple of free and paid recipe apps for both android and iOS. All Recipes Dinner Spinner, Cookpad and Epicurious to name a few. The one however that caught my eye was instacart. All the apps previously mentioned are strictly recipe apps however, instacart is predominantly a grocery shopping and delivery app with secondary functions like viewing recipes. None of these apps however solved the problem provided in the prompt.

A couple of takeaways I got from the analysis are:

There's a need for a collaborative cooking app in the market.
Instacart is the only app that takes away the pain point of having to shop the ingredients you don't have available and it's not primarily a cooking app.
There's a market for apps like this among young adults. I also believe it'd be a huge competition for meal plan services like Hello Fresh.

Here's the user persona and user journey I based my solutions off of:

Persona