Today, cooking has become a necessary skill for all, especially for working professionals who don’t live with their families.

And those who want to learn cooking find it very complex as they need to know the recipe and spend time getting the right ingredients.

While there is Youtube to find recipes and delivery apps to get you the essentials you need, the whole process still requires a good amount of effort.

There is still scope to simplify this experience for cooking enthusiasts.

Assumptions made 📝

• The company that owns the app buys the ingredients for the customers and has a team of experts who craft the recipes.
• An easy-to-follow recipe card is included with step-by-step instructions.
• Perfectly portioned ingredients, safely packed and labeled for the customer’s convenience.

Target group 👩‍🏫

• People with 9–5 jobs who are very busy and have very less time on their hands but wish to eat healthy home-cooked food.
• From age 22 to 45.

Scope of this project 🚀

I’m not aiming to solve the problem completely with this design, instead, I have worked on a idea which can be implemented with a few screens which can pave the way forward for further modifications and establish a baseline from where one can start thinking forward.

This project majorly focuses on the UI part and a little bit of UX part.

The flows are not complete but one can get a fair idea of how the flows can progress further ahead. The technicalities involved in these flows are something which I will not be focusing on this time.

A few User Interface screens 🎨

The homescreen shows the best-selling items on the list and is infinitely scrollable.

The card element of the homepage shows a top-view of the dish along with the name of the dish, number of servings, vegetarian/non-vegetarian, dish origin, ratings & price.

Tapping on the dish takes the user to a new page where the user can see a brief description of the dish along with the ingredients provided in the box, directions and similar items.

The user may directly purchase the recipe from this screen and is taken to the cart with final billing details where they can add the address and preferred delivery time. Hence to the payment gateway to pay for the order.

Else the user can add the item to the cart and keep browsing for more recipes to order. Once done, the user can tap on the cart icon to finalise things.

The user can also view past orders and check details or contact customer support directly from the order details.

How does this app impact the users? 💥

Ravi, usually orders food from Zomato/Swiggy everytime. He is interested in cooking but it’s a tedious task for him as —

• Has to watch YouTube videos and figure out the ingredients and recipe.
• Get the ingredients from the local store or get it delivered using an app.
• Uncertainity of getting the ingredients required.
• Uncertainity of how much ingredients to be added to the dish.

All of this takes a lot of time, even tho Ravi wants to eat home cooked meals he is unable to make time because of his busy schedule. Hence he goes back to ordering food from Zomato/Swiggy.

If Ravi uses makery app to order curated recipe boxes, he can skip the entire process of watching a YouTube video to figure out the ingredients, getting the ingredients, figuring out the quantity of ingredients to be added while cooking.

• The box contains all the ingredients along with a simple step-by-step instruction cards to prepare the dish.
• The ingredients are provided accurately.
• Can prepare the meal relatively quicker than the older process.

Sanjana has a tiffin service which delivers to Sanjana’s place. She does not like the taste of the food delivered by the tiffin service although she loves cooking and can cook her meals but she can’t do it on a regular basis as she doesn’t have the time since it involves shopping for ingredients, cutting of vegetables, etc.

Now, Sanjana can order curated recipe boxes and can enjoy tasty meals whenever she wants to. She gets to have delicious recipes which are homecooked by her as it does not take a lot of time to cook as the box has everything.

Final thoughts 🏁

Services like Hello Fresh already does something similar for the US centred audience and has proved that there is a market of people who want to purchase curated recipe boxes.

The name of the project ‘Makery’ is from a brand which currently does sell recipe boxes on their webpage in India (https://makery.in/).

This project establishes a baseline, basic UI on how the recipe boxes can be presented and the major user flow.

This will have plenty of edge cases which needs to be filtered out by user-testing and multiple rounds of iterations on the main project. But that does not lie in the scope for this project, at least for now.

Would you order curated recipe boxes?

Let me know in the comments below.

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