Alchemist
A food waste management culinary app
Alchemist is an app to help users find recipes to cook while using food items that they already have in their fridge. This will help to limit food waste & the overall stress that comes with cooking a meal. The definition of Alchemist means to create something through a seemingly magical process, like cooking by mixing ingredients.
The Purpose
The first step of the project was to define its challenge: How can we make sustainable food consumption attainable for everyone? We wanted to do this by creating a culinary app that provides recipes & ingredients, encourages sustainability & provides resources, and creates a community for people to share their favorite recipes.
The Process
Before designing, we made some assumptions about the target demographic we wanted to create for:
- People don’t know much about managing food waste
- Some feel disorganized and are busy with other commitments
- Individuals spend time researching recipes on multiple platforms
Main assumption and mind mapping
We then asked ourselves the following questions in order to find answers:
- What makes potential users feel overwhelmed?
- Do they have background knowledge of food waste?
- Why do they want to cook a good meal?- What makes it difficult to find meal ideas?
- How can we make it easier to discover new meals that consider foods that - users already have in their fridge?
Through interviewing many different individuals, it was evident that we were creating an app thats demographic are millennials with children or others to take care of. This group of people answered that they are often busy and don't have time to cook elaborate meals but that they have others to feed.
We also discovered that:
- People are busy. They need something easy, straight forward and enjoyable
- People would like to be able to save recipes to use in the future
- People have different dietary restrictions and foods they don’t eat. They need flexible recipes and variety- No one wants to waste food. They want recipes that can serve many (for big families and meal prep)
"I’m always at work and have little time to chill out or
take care of myself."
"I don’t know much about food waste. It’s a new topic
to me but if it involves saving money, I’m into it."
"I get stressed when I can’t make time for important things. Chores get in the way."
The insights we found from the interviewing and research process allowed us to create user journey maps or potential wins and obstacles that someone may have with the Alchemist app. This includes the possibility of someone coming home from a long day of work and having to cook while hungry and tired, as well as the posting process and sharing a recipe.
User journey map | Cooking after work
User journey map | Finding Alchemist through social media
We then honed in on three key feature priorities. This included an area to save recipes to reference for later, a way for users to communicate with others (ratings, comments) and a feed with a filtered search to look and find recipes with ingredients that a user already has in their fridge.
Lastly, we gathered inspiration from multiple sources and found a love for rounded and organic curves as this would convey a friendly feel.
Inspiration and references
The Outcome
We chose green as a visual element as it represents freshness. It's friendly and conveys the feeling of science that the word alchemist stands for. Typography was chosen to be easy to read on screens and to come across as clean and minimal. We also created a set of illustrations and iconography in order to help users navigate the app.
Brand guideline
Logo rationale
Over the course of thirteen weeks, our team was able to create an apps user interface while keeping user experience in mind. Users are now able to discover a variety of recipes shared by others with the option to search by ingredient. This minimizes the amount of food wasted in the users house hold and ultimately saves money on food costs as well as the environment.
Services as a team
Research
User testing
Concept development
Copywriting
Copywriting
Interviewing
Illustration
Wireframes
Wireframes
Brand identity & guidelines
Prototyping & user testing
Prototyping & user testing
UI & UX design
Made with
Figma
Illustrator
Work by Yuki Lam, Serena Savoie & Michaela Joy
