About ChefCircle

Chef Circle is a social media platform dedicated to all things cooking- recipes, lessons, and photo sharing for anyone who wants to cook, from chefs to novices.

Overview

This design process relied on gathering insights from user surveys, and used that information to create a prototype. The final product design allows users to create and share recipes and photos of their culinary creations.

Process

Objectives & Goals

Create a place where users can save, create, discover, learn, and share recipes.

Make a space where users can connect with others through a cooking social media platform.

Phase 1:

Discover

Survey possible users with a variety of needs and cooking experience

Survey

I conducted an online survey with 5 users that fell into my target demographic: people who use other forms of social media.

How often do you cook at home?

How do you currently discover recipes?

“ I have like a million recipes saved from Instagram or Pinterest but I rarely end up coming back to them.”

— Surveyed User

Are you interested in learning new cooking techniques?

How often do you to share photos of food you have cooked?

“Something like a Goodreads for cooking would be cool. I’d love to challenge friends at cooking competitions.”

— Surveyed User

Phase 2:

Define

User personas
Journey mapping
Goals based on pain points

User Personas & Journey Maps

Using the data collected from my survey, I created a user persona and journey map for their responses.

Goals Based on Pain Points

Create a systematic way to find recipes and save them all into organized folders.

Have tutorials customized to the users needs and connected to recipes

Design a space where one can share their culinary work with all their cooking-interested friends

Phase 3:

Ideate

Create task flows
Design lo-fi wireframes

Taskflows

With the three key features of the app chosen, I created task flows to guide my design choices before moving into prototyping that would make these features usable and intuitive.