One spot to store all of your favorite online recipes!
As technology has improved and allowed us to move more of our daily tasks online, recipes have increasingly moved to digital mediums such as online blogs, Youtube and Google searches.
Most people use recipes from several different recipe websites when they cook. It can be very difficult to organize all of these recipes, remember where it was from or where it was saved, wasting time and adding unnecessary frustration to your cooking process. RecipeHub provides an organized and convenient location for storing all your recipes, saving time and frustration on searching for past recipes and giving you comfort that your recipes will not be lost.
We conducted a user research survey involving 67 respondents and found that 97% of respondents use recipes in a digital form. We also found that 86% of home cooks have reported that they refer to at least 2 different recipe sources (see Graph 1) such as physical recipe books, online recipes from Google searches, cooking blogs, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram to find inspiration for their weekly meals, confirming that there might be some challenges in organizing all of these recipes online.
When asked if home cooks are saving their recipes, we found that 77% (see Graph 2) of people are saving their recipes in some way (taking screenshots, adding the recipe link in their phone notes, saving to a Google Doc or bookmarking in their browser).
Although there is a high percentage of people saving their recipes, to our surprise, people are rarely referring back to these recipes. We conducted user interviews involving 10 participants to dive deeper. When asked why they don’t refer back to their saved recipes, respondents indicated that the process can be time consuming and frustrating. For example, recipe phone notes and screenshots get mixed in with non-recipe related content that makes it inefficient to search through. Most people reported that it feels easier and faster to Google the recipe again.
We were able to validate that there is a desire to save recipes, but home cooks have not found a method that is effective at accomplishing this job.
From our interviews and surveys, we found some other interesting information that influenced the features we wanted to implement:
Our goal was to create a product that would allow users to save recipes and
We initially wanted to create a web-app that would allow users to input a URL into our platform and our web-app would automatically be able to web scrape and bring in the data for each recipe. However, upon further investigation from our devs team, we learned that this solution would involve expenses and extra effort. So we decided to pivot our solution in order to meet our team’s constraints of time, effort and budget.
Our solution is a web-app, RecipeHub, where users can easily save their favourite recipes for future use. Our team focused on three main features/components that we wanted to complete: