Overview

Pantry Pal is a convenient app that helps you create delicious meals using the ingredients you already have at home. Whether you're trying to use up leftovers or want to avoid making a trip to the grocery store, Pantry Pal allows you to input the ingredients you have on hand and generates recipe ideas based on what you've got in your pantry.

The goal of Pantry Pal is to simplify meal planning and reduce food waste by suggesting recipes based on the ingredients users have on hand.

Project

Personal Passion Project

Tools

Figma
Miro
Google Forms
ChatGPT

What I Learned

When designing a cooking app like Pantry Pal, I learned the importance of creating a clear and intuitive user flow that guides the user through the recipe search and selection process and the value of incorporating visually appealing and informative images to help users visualize the end result.

I also learned that providing a wide range of filtering options, such as dietary preferences and cooking time, can help users find recipes that align with their needs and preferences. Testing and iterating on design choices is essential for creating a seamless and enjoyable user experience.

USER RESEARCH

Survey

Demographic

Ages 23-36
Male and female
American, Asian, Mexican

Professions

Participants

People in full time jobs
House wife
Student

16 people

Insights

1. People frequently find themselves with leftover ingredients that they don't know how to use.

2. Deciding what to eat based on what they have at home is a commonality among many people.

3. People prefer to search for recipes online more often than to try to come up with something on their own, suggesting that an app like PantryPal would be useful.

4. Having a way to filter out recipes based on dietary restrictions can be extremely helpful.

USER STORIES

As a user, I want the app to suggest recipies based on my dietary preferences.

As a user, I want a place where I can see easy recipies that can be filtered based on cuisine etc.

User Flows

Why User flows?

It serves as a blueprint for the user experience.
It helps the designer understand the sequence of steps a user takes to accomplish a specific task.
It ensures that the UI is designed to meet the user's needs and expectations.
It provides a smooth and seamless user experience.
Without a clear understanding of the user's journey, the UI can be disjointed and confusing.

Creating a user flow helps designers to:

Determine the optimal UI layout
Identify the most important features to include in the UI
Identify opportunities to improve the user experience
Identify potential areas for innovation.

PantryPal - Userflow - PantryPal Workflow-2.jpg

This Workflow shows a user's step-by-step process when using the Pantry Pal app to find and cook a recipe. It illustrates the key actions that a user might take, such as adding ingredients, searching/filtering through recipes, saving recipes to a favorites list, and adding ingredients to a shopping list. By breaking down the user's experience into discrete steps, the user flow helps to identify potential pain points or areas where the app could be improved to better meet the user's needs.

In doing this user flow I realized the most important displays I needed to design are the home page, discover page, Ingredient list (list and category view), saved recipes, full recipe page, sort and filter popup and add new ingredient popup.