REGAZINE – Recipe Recommendation App

Regazine

Recipe Recommendation App based on Image Recognition Technology

Project for UX Design Strategies class, I designed this Recipe App based on image recognition technology to provide users with the recipe recommendations based on what they have in their refrigerators. This App tries to provide the user a quick and easy way to pick a recipe.

Photo by Aneta Ivanova, Alison Marras, Brooke Lark, Calum Lewis Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash.

Problem

Today's recipes Apps do not consider how to use present ingredients in people’s kitchens best. In this case, people have specific kinds of ingredients in their refrigerator, but they have no ideas how to mix them up or cook in an apparent way.

Approaches

This App provides users with a mobile experience that offers accessible recipes based on what ingredients they own to enhance their lives in a healthy and environment-friendly way.

Objectives

Provide the users more personalized and healthy recipe recommendations when they have no idea about how to mixing the exist ingredients to enhance the users’ life quality and to reduce food waste.

Incorporating the local food markets, the App could increase the sales volume of local food according to the recipe recommendations.

By recording people’s dinning habits, it could help people to form a better lifestyle and help people to discover their lives via foods.

Persona & User Story

Garrett Ruiz

22 / Senior Student / NYU / New York City

“I love cooking but I do not have so much time preparing the ingredients.”

Garrett Ruiz is a senior student whose major is business in New York University. He is preparing his thesis and looking for a job as well. He lives alone in Manhattan. He likes whole food market and have enough budget to buy the ingredient. He enjoys cooking by himself but he doesn’t have much skills about it. Thus, he read some recipe books and he is using some cooking App to help him. Since he has a tight schedule of studying and socializing in his senior year, so he does’t have so much time preparing the ingredients according to the recipe instructions. He comes to food market or super market once a week, and he buys whole-week foods.

Lillie Henderson

36 / Small Business Owner / Mother / Rochester

“I need to prepare food for my family. I try different kinds of foods. Fresh ingredients are my favorite.”

Lillie Henderson owns a small business in Rochester that sells flowers. She has two children and she needs to prepare foods for the whole family. She loves public market and she shop food ingredients almost every day. She prefers to use fresh ingredients to maintain the quality of food. She have time to prepare foods and she loves to try different kinds of food. She is good at cooking and she uses Apps to find more cuisines and cooking skills. She has stable income, and she has same routine everyday.

User Needs

High-quality, fresh, healthy and time-based recommendations in the front page.

Clear interface to show the recipe details. It should have good readability.

Online shopping and ingredient delivery. It may include shopping list for offline use.

Comparative Analysis

Search is located in the middle of tab bar. It provide categories to search. All recipes are showed as articles, users need time to read it, which is not a good way to learn.

Users can create shopping list according to the saved recipes. Information is displayed as card. Card is filled with gorgeous dish pictures or moving GIFs, which is attractive. App uses different kinds of icon to present the information.

App will record you preferences at first like cuisines, allergies, diets, disliked foods, cooking skills level. It also recommends some recipes to match users' styles. Main page just displayed the customized recipes for users. Recipes show calories, nutrition, and time.

So how can we find the "best" recipes now?

Searching based on ingredients

This is the most direct way to get recipes. It's easy to do, and it helps users to mix the ingredients they have. But it takes time. Users need to make the ingredients clear, and then find the best one from the result list.

View Recipe Type

It's a personalized way to find what you want. By viewing the whole types of food, you can match the flavor and the ingredient. The inconvenient point is it's hard to decide the type. An individual may have different preferences, which means you need to set them up before you start using one product.

View Daily Recommendations

Daily recommendations are the closest things that users can get. But it's hard to be accurate. People pick their ingredients randomly, so how can we make daily recommendation help people decide?

Proposed solution

Image Recognition and instant recommendations

Provide the users with rich interactive way like image uploading to upload ingredients they own and instant recipe recommendations based on the image recognition results of ingredients image.

Online Ordering

Provide the users with online ordering function if they missed some ingredients.

High-Quality

The App can offer dependable and high-quality recommendations. Users can save what they like.

Information Architecture

Information Architecture helps me think about the structure and how information display. Based on the problems, this App concludes three main functions, which are "Recommendation", "Recipe Search", and "Shop", to solve the problems. Its magazine style recommendation will be the first thing displayed. The search function will appear in the menu, which is universal.

Use Cases

Here are the three primary use cases for this App according to the central functions.

"Eight a Day" Recommendations

Just eight recommendations based on users' preferences will show on the first screen. Fewer but better quality recommendations can relatively save the effort finding recipes.

Quick Start

Tap the time button, and you are ready to go. Users can see additional information and change the number of serves.

Ingredient List

If a user select any recipe, she/he will get the ingredient list to help she/he prepare.

Online Ordering

Users can tap the "+" button to collect those ingredients to the shopping cart.

Ingredients Match

If the users have any ingredient already (by using Image Recognition function), the App will match these ingredients and help users remove them from the shopping list.

Search by Types

The App offers various ways to help users find the right recipe.

Ingredient Capture,

a new way to find

what you love.

We try to make everything in your refrigerator valuable for you. With “Ingredient Capture”, you can simply place all your ingredients on a board, and put them in the field of your phone camera. The system will recognise different ingredients and give you feedbacks.