save&make

Problem Statement  

How can we make it easier to navigate recipe information from social media and allow for actual execution of recipes & save time? 

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Problem Background  

According to my user research, 82% of participants store recipes in some sort of folder or application from one of their social platforms and over 50% of them rarely make their recipes. 

Focusing on city-living millennials, working both remotely and hybrid and who cook at least 2-3 times a week, their main priorities are simplicity & how to save time . These millennials that cook at home nowadays end up "saving" recipes or how-tos in different applications or folders. This immediate saving and storing creates a sense of information overload and can get lost in the backlog of photos. This information overload makes sense since per a February 2024 report from Snap Inc. and IPG Magna, cooking recipes are the most popular form of influencer created social media content, according to 51% of worldwide social media users. 

And what if there are more than one recipe someone wants to make? Consolidating grocery lists and making sure you get the right items for each (especially when they overlap) can be time consuming and prone to error. All important things to think about when you’re busy trying to live your life. 

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Research Insights & User Pain Points

• “I screenshot or save new recipes but at the end of the day I can’t remember what I saved and it just becomes recipe overload” - User Interview #1
• “Conversion rates are difficult to deal with when grocery shopping, especially w multiple recipes” - User Interview #1
• “Too many steps from figuring out what to make to then going out and buying the things and making it” - User Interview #2

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Supporting Data

• 91% of the survey participants say it’s important for them to cook for themselves 
• 81% of the survey participants say it’s difficult to do so because of time constraints 
• 45% of the survey participants say they rarely reference the recipes they’ve saved

But 58% would like to try to cook something new at least once a month
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Feedback

It’s clear that there’s a saving trend and people want to cook more for themselves, however time constraints and lack of simplicity have made it difficult to do so. Users don’t want another app to add to the steps they already have to make but are curious how this could save them time and help organise themselves. 

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Future Steps

• I’d like to further investigate the volume of saved cooking information some text
  • I want to evaluate how large of a pain point it is and how much room is there to help
• I’d like to understand dev work that needs to be done to seamlessly connect the social media platform to save&make some text
  • What would it look like to not save the recipe on the app but automatically save it into save&make 
• I’d like to mock up the login & navigation page of save&make 

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Learnings

• Overconsumption is a big part of social media and interestingly enough, cooking & meal content is one of the top types that are produced. 
• People are still motivated to cook and would even like to cook more
• There is a want to minimise the content noise and provide simplicity to cooking new recipes 

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