Concept design and a prototype for Gastronomy Webpage
When I first realized I was constantly skipping meals, I thought it was because of my hectic lifestyle, but it took me couple of months to understand that skipping meals have become a choice. That's when I started to seek for more information about this habit: why we do this? what leads us to say no to food? what can be done and how to be back on track?
The main pattern we saw during research phase that skipping meals at some point forms as an addiction.
The main pain points were:
Skipping meals to lose weight, Time issue, Not finding food appealing, lose of interest in everyday dishes, no energy to cook, overwhelming recipes.
Initial concepts:
Imagine a website, like APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) but instead of giving you mouth watering food photography, it suggests you to try new recipes every single day. Since the initial concepts were based on random suggestions, the website won't have search option nor profile option. I used to be a huge fan of Calendar-type websites and daily suggestions. Besides, discovering something new can be therapeutic sometimes.
The layout we chose is known as Featured Image layout, the image serves to get full attention and interest to a focal point published on the page, in our case this could be the photography of the food we were offering on that particular day, it was also important to include the name of the author or the recipe and country of origin. Even though this layout is mostly used for niche blogs, professional portfolios, we decided it could be a beneficial for two reasons: engage with user while keeping them being overwhelmed.
We tried to make design as minimalistic as possible, sitemap as you can see is quite simple while main focus stays on the photo and recipe. Since the concept is random yet interesting suggestions, we decided to make a room for users to make their own choice, hence the catalogue will be full with various recipes from all around the world, so instead of forcing users prepare one particular dish, we are leaving space for them to choose what they want. To make users engaged and interested in exploring healthy meal plans, we decided to introduce them to the COOKBOOK, all the dishes they cook using this website will be included in the annual cookbook which tells the their journey with Dish Discovery.
Next steps:
1. Iterate more on COOKBOOK concept design. conduct another research and usability study.
2. Adding Calendar and implement rewarding system
The main pattern we saw during research phase that skipping meals at some point forms as an addiction.
The main pain points were:
Skipping meals to lose weight, Time issue, Not finding food appealing, lose of interest in everyday dishes, no energy to cook, overwhelming recipes.
Initial concepts:
Imagine a website, like APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) but instead of giving you mouth watering food photography, it suggests you to try new recipes every single day. Since the initial concepts were based on random suggestions, the website won't have search option nor profile option. I used to be a huge fan of Calendar-type websites and daily suggestions. Besides, discovering something new can be therapeutic sometimes.
The layout we chose is known as Featured Image layout, the image serves to get full attention and interest to a focal point published on the page, in our case this could be the photography of the food we were offering on that particular day, it was also important to include the name of the author or the recipe and country of origin. Even though this layout is mostly used for niche blogs, professional portfolios, we decided it could be a beneficial for two reasons: engage with user while keeping them being overwhelmed.
We tried to make design as minimalistic as possible, sitemap as you can see is quite simple while main focus stays on the photo and recipe. Since the concept is random yet interesting suggestions, we decided to make a room for users to make their own choice, hence the catalogue will be full with various recipes from all around the world, so instead of forcing users prepare one particular dish, we are leaving space for them to choose what they want. To make users engaged and interested in exploring healthy meal plans, we decided to introduce them to the COOKBOOK, all the dishes they cook using this website will be included in the annual cookbook which tells the their journey with Dish Discovery.
Next steps:
1. Iterate more on COOKBOOK concept design. conduct another research and usability study.
2. Adding Calendar and implement rewarding system
Even though this was just a concept in my mind, I decided to quickly built some mockups to check if it would meet the products I've imagined in my head. This is what I came up with. The main user flow will be very simple, homepage > choose recipe > go to instructions page.
Minimalistic navigation panel
I will continue working on it, refine and iterate on interactions.