Peas in a Pod

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Not having well organized vegetarian and vegan recipes that are suitable for young children and babies at one place. Lack of having unified place for recipe search creates decision fatigue with parents, and further more they are seeking for their solutions on various different online platforms.

• low-fidelity wireframes

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

This app is meant to gather vegetarian and vegan recipes suitable for children of a young age. Parents could save their favorite recipes and always have quick access to them. Features of the app would be adding recipes to favorites, creating your recipes, sharing with friends, searching by ingredients, and filtering allergens.

DISCOVERY

USER NEEDS

  • get inspirational recipes at one place

  • filtering option to eliminate any dietary restrictions or allergies

  • filtering by age of a child

  • nice and clear categorization of vegetarian and vegan recipes

  • ability to save recipes to user’s favorites list

  • adding ingredients to user’s shopping list

RESEARCH METHODS

• Competitive analysis

Competitive analysis was conducted for a purpose of getting a strategic insight into the design flows, design features and all the design solutions of our competitors.

What I’ve learned from other brands is to keep the visual identity consistent throughout the entire application, to have consistent and clear visual hierarchy. Another valuable insight was to have fresh and appealing images of food, that would be visualy attractive to the potential users.

• personas & user Scenarios

• Task Flow

VISUAL DESIGN

Irma is a young mother living in San Francisco and working full-time as an architect. A vegetarian for 12 years, she wants to pass these values on to her 14-month-old daughter. However, her busy schedule makes it difficult to find suitable vegetarian recipes for young children. Frustrated by the time it takes to explore nutritious options, she needs a solution.

One evening, Irma shared her frustrations with her sister, who recommended an app called Peas in a Pod. The app collects vegan and vegetarian recipes suitable for babies. Excited, Irma downloaded the app immediately.

In the app store, she learned it’s a subscription-based service costing $3.99 per month. As a working mother with limited time, she was willing to pay for the convenience. She created an account via Facebook and started exploring.

The app allows users to apply filters such as baby’s age and dietary preferences. Irma entered her daughter’s age (14 months) and selected vegetarian options. The app generated a list of recipes. She chose Quinoa Pasta with Sautéed Kale and Seitan Sauce, clicked on the recipe card to view the ingredients, and added kale, butter, and quinoa pasta to her shopping list using checkboxes. The app’s hamburger menu provided access to her compiled shopping list.

Irma lands on a log in page where she enters her email address and password. From there she is taken to the main page with recipes where she can chose recommended recipes, trends or filter recipes. Since she has a 14 month baby, she goes directly to filters where she applies wanted
filters and from there she is shown recipes. Irma scrolls through filtered recipes and selects the wanted recipe, she is then taken to the recipe card. On the recipe card she first looks the ingredients, notices she is missing a few and by clicking on the plus sign she easily adds them
into the shopping bag. Irma reviews the shopping bag and from there click go back to see the recipe card again. After purchasing the missing ingredients she continues to the cooking method of the recipe, where she is led through it step by step.

wireframing & prototyping

In this phase I created preliminary sketches to test interactions and different layouts.

FINDINGS

it took users some time to figure out the exact flow and to analyze the icons on the navigation bar

  • make icons more understandable

  • create easily accessible favorites category

  • ability to save filters to be default state (in case of severe allergies)

  • suggestions for ingredients substitutions

  • some users had a trouble understanding a difference between Trends and Recommended