Savoury Days App provides an easy access to detailed cooking instructions writen by an experienced chef. With Savoury Days App, users can explore hundreds of recipes, create shopping lists, learn helpful tips, and more.
ROLE: Research and Discovery, Journey Mapping, User Flow, Wireframing, Visual Design
Problem
Finding new cooking recipes online can be overwhelming due to too many unreliable sources. Savoury Days stands out as a platform I can trust, as all recipes are personally created, tested, and refined by chef Linh Trang. Nonetheless, the platform needs to be improved. For example, the platform is replete with uncategorized content and often visually crowded with ads, making navigation time-consuming and a struggle. In addition, while it is abundant with information, there is no way users can manage the content they are interested in.
GOAL
Design a native app that offers users a seamless navigation experience, make search function easier and faster, and improve the interactivity between users and the business.
How do users feel about the current platform?
As a loyal user of Savoury Days, I gathered my initial pain points of the platform that I have personally experienced. Then, I conducted an observation research in person with another regular user of Savoury Days to validate my assumptions. By observing closely how the user perform simple tasks, I was able to notice nervous tics that signal that the user was feeling uncertain or stressed about certain parts of the platform. I also interviewed the user using a list of questions below to know more about her experience:
What are your purposes of using Savoury Days website?
What are your alternatives for finding cooking recipes?
How often do you use Savoury Days on desktop and mobile?
Why do you use Savoury Days on mobile?
How do you feel when using the site on mobile?
What do you like most about the site on mobile?
What do you dislike most about the site on mobile?
If you had a magic wand, what would you change?
“The user was able to find specific recipes with relative ease via the search function. She was demotivated from exploring new content, however, due to unintuitive navigation. For example, too much information being displayed made casual browsing on the site overwhelming.”
Journey mapping
Based on data collected from observation and the user interview, I created a user journey map to gain an insightful view of user thoughts, emotions, and motivations. This helped me identify the pain points and generate improvement ideas to soothe or eliminate them.
Define
With the insights gathered throughout the research, I defined main problems that act as the focus of this project.
Problem statement 1: I want to be comfortable with navigating the site, but there is so much scattered and uncategorized information. This causes me difficulty in finding relevant information or exploring new content, and I usually end up not feeling inspired.
Problem statement 2: I want to have access to the recipe I need as quickly as possible, but it is annoying when I have to search for it every single time. This is especially inconvenient when I go out and my phone does not have internet connection.
Problem statement 3: I am interested in the author’s cook books, but I feel helpless because there is no way for me to assess the quality of the books, and I end up not purchasing them.
Setting up the structure
I laid out different pathways a user can take when interacting with the app. By seeing all possible patterns at once, I was able to assess the information architecture further and learn how to enhance the ease of movement through the platform.
Sketching it out
I started visualizing the solutions by sketching out some low-fidelity wireframes in Adobe XD.
Explore and Connect
All recipes are organized into different categories, ranging from “Most Popular,” “Desserts,” to “Savoury dishes.” Meanwhile, blog posts, announcements, and Q&A sessions are in a separate tab - Connect. Overall, this division creates a much clearer and more inviting way to explore and discover content.
Search anything
Make the search function more straightforward to users by providing helpful tags. Users can now find relevant information by using the filter and choosing a combination of tags.
The app also offers informative feedback about system status. When users type in keywords to search for something, post suggestions will appear accordingly below.
Shop at ease
Users can effortlessly add the ingredients to the “Shopping list,” which is accessible later offline when they do groceries. Additionally, they can reorder, change the serving size, or delete specific lists using the “Edit” function.
Users can also save recipes and posts to their profile, which helps them efficiently manage the content they are interested in and avoid searching every time.
Personalization
Users can see their “Recently viewed” posts and all saved items.
Make smart purchasing decisions
The “Review” feature allows users to read trusted reviews from others, ensuring them the book's quality and encouraging them to buy it. Moreover, users can make their voice heard by leaving a review. Reviews will then be updated once an admin has approved them.
The “Book” view also contains detailed information about the book's new features and how to buy it both online and offline.
