Cookmate

About


It’s a social media app dedicated primarily to amateurs cooks but professionals cooks can also benefit from this. This app provides features for uploading and sharing content related to recipes.We provide an improved search option dedicated specifically to food related
searches and along with it, we provide user follower/following option just like any dedicated
social media app. It’s follows design pattern of existing social media apps which makes it
easy to use due to less learning curve.

Our Journey

We were asked to search for a problem statement for our Designing Human Centered
Systems Course.We then started to explore options related to cooking and how can we
improve the experience of cooking for a person who is enthusiastic about cooking .
We then stumbled upon opportunities for improving the experience for a person who
is new to cooking or wants to learn a new recipe but just not have right means to do it.
There are many housewives who want to learn to make new recipes but are not tech
literate enough to go and search on youtube for recipes or explore various food related
blogs . Next the question to analyse how can we improve the user experience ,so we formulated a set of questions and performed contextual inquiry about what all
actual features users need in the app.Since our target users are housewives and home
cooks so we went and asked them.Based on the responses received on the contextual
inquiry we drafted a first prototype of the app which we then showed to our users who
gave us feedback on all what needs to be changed.So based on regular feedback and
design iterations on several versions of our app we were able to successfully create a
version on which all users seemed to agree upon.The final version of our app was just a
seven screen app incorporating all the required functionalities .

We followed an ideology of design ,iterate ,evaluate regularly in order to make sure
that we never deviate from our primary goal of providing a better user interface to the
existing solutions .Throughout the creation of our app we followed many design principles
which we learned in the class like having a low gulf of execution and evaluation ,having
buttons which follow Fitts Law.Following a color scheme which follows the look ,feel and
purpose of the app .Having design patterns like scrollview which improve the look of the app.


Color Scheme used




Source - colorhunt.co
We used Adobe color wheel with Triad Colors, also we choose Amber color because we are making an app centered around food, and, it is found that colors like orange, amber, red, yellow, green trick a person's appetite because nature provides food in these colors while color like blue reduces the appetite because very few naturally occurring food is of blue color.So we went on colorhunt.com in order to see which all color palttets are used and based on that the above color pallete was adapoted since it incoprporates the idea of our app and the expirence we want our users to feel .

Converting the idea to reality(Protype creation)

Since the idea of the course is to follow the principle of design iterate and evalute we regaularly created protypes and they were evaulted by our target audeunce.Here we would like to give a special appreciation to our users who took their precious time in giving in us feedback for the app.
Below are the iterations which involved major changes in the app design ,others are omited.


First Design Iteration





The first iteration was a very rough layout of the app created which had all the basic functionalities of a social media app like posting ,uploading recipes .One of the major feedbacks we received on the first layout was that green color was not good as people were finding it hard to idealise with the purpose of the app.So hence this color was changed in next iterations .

Fourth Design Iteration



This is was the iteration after which we were sure how the final version would look like
and hence this helped in creating the final version which we showed in the BBI 2018.



Final Design Iteration





Design changes that we incorporated from First to last design are -


  • Color changed from green to Amber
  • Collapsable profile
  • An improved bottom navigation bar
  • Intuitive icons and buttons

How its different from existing App’s

Existing apps similar to this are yummly and cookpad. Yummly is not available for
india and cookpad UI is very difficult to use, also color scheme is not right.
Also many other apps are also concerned with selling and buying food items but our app is
focused solely on the expirence of sharing recipes.Since oour target audience is not tech literate
enough to use other mediums so hence all the functionality can be easily perfomed as the buttons
and icons used are very intituitve .This was the major principle which we had in mind while
designing the app .


Images from BBI18









Team Members




Team Members from Left to Right - Mayank Bhoria, Rohit Kumar, Mayank Kumar, Akash Kumar Gautam, Saurabh Kumar



Video Description


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X23dxkc4Nac&feature=youtu.be




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