Scrap Kitchen: A recipe app to help you reduce your food waste.
For our final project during Ironhack’s UX/UI Design Bootcamp, we were given 2 weeks to find a problem and design a solution.
The Problem
Imagine opening up your fridge, looking inside, and finding an old tomato. Having no idea what to cook with it, you end up throwing it away.
Some of you might be feeling frustrated at the waste of money… Others upset thinking about the mouths it could have fed… Or even angry at the impact waste like this is having on the environment.
Well, you’re not alone.
The Investigation
The User
Taking this information into account, I designed an application aimed at people like Anna. Anna is a Geography teacher who cares about the environment but finds it hard to plan ahead when it comes to mealtimes, and so often throws away her groceries. I wanted to help Anna reduce her food waste while also fulfilling her goals of trying new recipes and sharing her own.
I decided the product should be an application because, although users were split between using laptops and phones to look up recipes, almost all of them use their phones while cooking them. It also makes it easier for users to add ingredients while looking around their kitchen for inspiration.
The Solution
With the problem clear in my mind, I created an affinity map to brainstorm and organize everything I had learnt so far. From there, I could identify the key problems and rephrase them into questions in order to make sure that my solutions were really resolving the users’ frustrations.
Scrap Kitchen provides users with recipes based on what they already have in their kitchen. In this way, they can try new recipes without even leaving their home and rescue any ingredients that are close to expiry.
You can see in the wireframes below how this works. The user adds all the ingredients they have at home and is provided with relevant recipes. The recipes can then be filtered, reviewed, shared, noted, saved and favourited. These features were detected as the ones users most value in recipe apps during the investigation.
The Testing
What I struggled with most was finding a clear and visual way to identify recipes that users have all the ingredients for. After trying out many different options, I tested the most viable ones with users to see if they would be understood correctly. I went with the “check” and “!” it allowed for a cleaner design and a users related a cross with an error.
The UI
The Prototype
The Next Steps
The next step for Scrap Kitchen is a feature where you can upload your shopping list in order to be notified when ingredients are near expiry and provide you with the relevant recipes. This will save users time and offer a more rounded solution to the problem of food waste.
