Empty Pantry empowers the average home chef to cook creatively with limited ingredients
The Problem of Food Waste
To identify challenges and problems faced by everyday home cooks, I conducted a survey sent to 100 participants in the Chapel Hill area.
Over half of survey participants used a mobile device to search for new recipes
Of those who use a mobile device for recipes, over one third browsed recipes for the purpose of using up leftover groceries
The majority of home cooks felt that issue of food waste was either very important or important
Focusing Deeper
Next, I conducted 5 focus groups and 5 one-on-one interviews with home cooks to further understand the attitudes and motivations of home cooks.
What are Home Cooks Saying?
"I don't cook much and I have never been good at it. Using the same basic stuff to make the same things can get tiring."
"I hate wasting food at the end of the week and I feel bad throwing away things that go bad. I am cooking for myself and sometimes my roommate so it is hard to get through things each week without having something spoil."
"My family has a lot of different food allergies and I have to cater to a lot of people. It would be nice to have way to filter through certain recipes online that contain things that I can't risk cooking with."
"I am a broke college student and sometimes I overestimate my grocery list, but I can't really afford to be throwing away all the produce I don't get to"
The Bigger Issue
For many home cooks, leftover groceries at the end of the week are an issue of waste. When perishable products and produce go to the garbage, this affects finances and brings on feelings of discontent. Home chefs often find themselves with random groceries leftover, unsure of how to use them in creative dishes.
User Personas
The Design Process
Hierarchy Chart
Usability Testing
After the first design prototype was completed, we conducted a 10 minute contextual inquiry session with 10 different users and found that a majority felt that the profile was purposeless without a function to share, favorite, and compose recipes of their own.
This feedback led me to add more components of social media into the final product of the Empty Pantry App
The Empty Pantry App
Empty Pantry's objective is to provide a convenient and ever-changing platform where the content will integrate user-uploaded recipes, allowing others to learn from their community while staying true to the mission of providing users with the most realistic, home-grown recipes.
Users are able to search with selected ingredients in their virtual pantry. Using only the selected ingredients, Empty Pantry is able to curate a variety of recipes that can be easily created with just those simple ingredients.
Users are able to engage with The Empty Pantry community by favoriting, rating, reviewing, and composing their own recipes to add to the archive. The user profile highlights the user's average ratings, favorited recipes, and top rated recipes.
Interactive Prototype
Final Thoughts and Reflection
Overall, it was exciting to complete my first design project!
Things I learned:
•Basic Prototyping with Figma
•Writing ethical and effective survey questions to gauge users' issues and interests.
In the Future...
•Record my wire frame iterations
•Create a higher fidelity prototype
•Practice animation tools
