What is Chow?
Have you ever wanted to learn how to cook and experience dishes from cultures and places from all over the world but didn't know where to start?
Chow is a recipe app made for foodies everywhere. With a wide collection of recipes and easy-to-follow instructions, simply find and save new recipes you’ve been eager to dish out! Expand your cooking skillset and learn about different cultures with Chow.
Sifting through thousands of recipes can be overwhelming and hard to choose from. Home cooks enjoy cooking and trying new recipes, but they don’t want to be stressed while doing it. Chow allows users to have access to digestible information about the culture behind a new dish they’re trying out and easy-to-follow cooking guides. Chow makes cooking an easy and fun learning experience.
Methods: Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, User Personas, User Flows, Wireframes, Prototypes, Usability Testing
Tools: Sketch, Balsamiq, InVision
Competitor Analysis
To get a better understanding of the competitor landscape, we conducted analyses on two popular recipe apps on the market, Yummly and Tasty.
App #1 – Yummly
Competitor Overview
Key Objective: Yummly states that it is “your smart cooking sidekick” and stands out through a personalized experience and recommendations. The user is able to narrow down recipes (they have over 2 million) through specific dietary needs, tastes, and preferences. Yummly learns about what you like and only recommends recipes that matches what you enjoy to cook and eat.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths: One of the largest databases for recipes, wide variety of foods that encompasses very many dietary preferences, personalized recommendations for a more curated experience
Weaknesses: Lots of content to view, so it may become overwhelming for someone who does not cook or is familiar with recipe apps. Each screen has a lot of information to take in, so there is not enough breathing space at times
Opportunities: Make the Yummly experience more fun through video tutorials. The current experience is very curated but still feels too technological, needs a more human touch to the experience
Threats: Vast amount of recipes can be too much for the average user, having too many options/different categories can be confusing and hard to navigate
App #2 – Tasty
Competitor Overview
Key Objective: Tasty is the “world’s largest food network”. They stand out from competitor recipe apps in that there is a tutorial video with every single recipe they showcase. They’re easy to follow and “snack-sized”, meaning they’re short and to the point. They claim to have new recipes and videos every day to keep things updated. Their app is well organized and easy to navigate through diet preferences and other filters to better suit the user.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths: Wide variety of recipes, easy to follow video tutorials, viral videos across social media platforms
Weaknesses: Accessible but can be overwhelming with the amount of content available for new cookers, videos are very short so it can appear to be easier than it really is
Opportunities: Allow users to submit their own recipes to expand diversity and a larger sense of community brought together by food
Threats: Very saturated space, there are lots of similar apps with a wide breadth of recipes, so they need to stay innovative and captivating
User Interviews
With the goal of understanding how home cooks searched and executed new recipes, which features they deemed most important, and the issues they were facing, we interviewed a handful of home cooks of varying expertise and cooking styles.
Key Findings & Insights
With our research, we were better able to understand the needs and frustrations of our users, and our key findings included:
Clear and Concise: Users wanted recipes that were not too wordy or cluttered. They wanted listed ingredients and instructions that were to the point.
Tailor to Skill Level: Users wanted their recipes to fit their skillset despite their level of expertise. They have a desire to expand their knowledge but did not want to be overwhelmed if the recipes were too complicated for them.
Background Knowledge: Users were willing and excited to learn new dishes from cultures they were unfamiliar with. They were interested in knowing more behind key ingredients and learning beyond just the food.
"Home cooks need a way to learn new recipes from around the world because they are often limited on their knowledge about unfamiliar dishes."
The users were asked to complete a few tasks that would test certain features of the app and were asked how the felt about Chow in terms of ease of use and navigation through recipes.
Positives: Users were able to complete tasks quickly, Users found navigation to be intuitive, Users enjoyed eye-catching recipe card on home screen
Negatives: Users suggest different card layout for Favorites screen, Users were unable to easily get back to recipe from Learn More screen, Arrow on Recipe screen didn't clearly come across as where the cooking instructions would be
