Fallera - Social Cooking
Human Factors Interface Design, Fall 2012
We intend to address the subject of social cooking. Our hope is that our project will incentivize cooking instead of eating out by helping individuals to enjoy the experience of cooking with others. Cooking and eating meals with others is, for many people, more enjoyable than cooking and eating by oneself. In addition, home-cooked food tends to be healthier than restaurant or take-out food. Social cooking will allow our users to eat better, make new friends or spend more time with old friends, try new recipes, and learn different cooking techniques.
Several websites, such as cookingwithfriends.com and epicurious.com, allow people to read and comment on new recipes. The limit on the social interaction in cooking as presented in these websites, however, is in sharing recipes--the sites do not present a way whereby people can actually get together and cook. For example, we found www.cookingwithfriendsclub.com, which at first glance seems to support social cooking; however, the site simply tells people how to do social cooking and does not support organizing of an event. For people with limited time availability, getting together to cook could provide a way to enjoy being social while fulfilling the daily responsibility of making food for oneself and one’s family. Other websites, such as whenisgood.net and doodle.com, exist which can help individuals plan an event together, but the interface only takes into account participants’ schedules. Our project will integrate use of individuals’ calendars, their food preferences, ingredients and social media to connect users--either friends or new acquaintances--through cooking.
Our project team is composed of Mandy Korpusik (group manager), Colby Sato (evaluation manager), Molly Grossman (communications manager), and Joe Gibson (design manager). As group manager, Mandy brings experience in planning, organizing, and keeping people on task. She also has programming experience, though not in web or mobile development. Colby enjoys conveying information in a visual manner, including making illustrations and diagrams and taking photographs. He also brings creativity, which we hope will aid in integrating user feedback into our designs. Molly has experience in technical and formal writing, including synthesizing ideas into a coherent presentation. Like Mandy, she has extensive programming experience but little experience working with web or mobile development. Joe has the most solid programming background of the team members. He has experience working in web design, though not on mobile applications, and will lead implementation efforts as well as the design process. We think that our collective background in programming will allow us to learn web or mobile implementation without much difficulty. We also bring a variety of life experiences and perspectives to the team.
Our primary users fall into two main groups. The first group consists of singles or young couples, most likely in the 20- to 30-year-old range. This user group includes college students and people who have recently moved to a city. These individuals are likely to have a restricted budget for food and will benefit from sharing food costs and having more of a variety in their menu than they would be able to achieve on their own. The users may be looking to meet new people, potentially to make friends in a new area or to find a romantic partner. These cooks are young and enjoy learning new recipes and techniques from other people, and they have fun teaching others what they already know.
The second group consists of parents, primarily parents of young children. Many young couples complain of not having time to see their friends because they are too busy and do not have time to sync schedules. Our project would take care of that step in the process for them, and by setting friends up to cook together, our project would enable parents to spend time with friends while accomplishing daily tasks. These users may be tired of cooking and want to share the burden, or they might enjoy exchanging recipes and techniques to spice up their routine. Users in this group are most likely to use the website or app to set up meetings with current friends than to try to find new people.
We expect to have an easy time finding users with whom to discuss our project. We will start with people we know on campus, including students and professors. We will also talk to our families and, with permission, the families of professors to get a better idea of what happens in a typical home. In addition, we will talk to Olin graduates who are working or are in graduate school, and through them we may talk to their friends and colleagues. We think that through this network we will be able to cover all of our primary users.
We will be able to gauge what features are most applicable after meeting with users. Preliminarily, we expect that our app will help individuals connect with other individuals or small groups, perhaps 1-3 other people. Individuals will be recommended to cook with others based on shared cooking interests, including favorite recipes, cuisine preferences, and food allergies or restrictions. Users can form groups of people that they know, such as a friend group or people working at the same company. Users will also have the option to meet new people, such as individuals in the same geographic area or singles looking to date. The app will take each user’s schedule into account and suggest meeting times and recipes accordingly, ensuring the cooking times of the suggested recipes are appropriate for the length of the meeting. The app could also take into account ingredients that each user already has, thereby helping users finish ingredients that might otherwise go to waste.
If we were to implement our project today, we would use the following design. Upon visiting our website, the user will find a welcome page on which he or she can sign in. When a user creates his or her profile, the user will be asked to input cuisine preferences and upload favorite recipes. These recipes might be typed up by the user or linked to common recipe-sharing sites such as epicurious.com. After signing in, the user’s profile will come up with several tabs. The first tab will be the individual’s availability. Users will be able to sync the app with an electronic calendar (such as Outlook, iPhone, or Google calendars) or to input their schedules manually via an interface similar to that used by whenisgood.com. The second tab will be the user’s pantry--a list of ingredients the user has readily available at home. The third tab will contain the user’s cuisine preferences, food restrictions and allergies, and recipe collection. Each of these will be easily updateable, and the user will be able to import recipes easily from recipe sharing sites. The factors on this tab will be used, along with the items in the user’s pantry, to suggest recipe ideas. The fourth tab will contain groups of which the user is a member. Sample user-defined groups might be soccer mothers in Needham, Olin College students, or a group of friends. The final tab will allow users to connect with other users at large based on user-specified criteria, such as individuals looking for a date or people within a small geographical radius. The home page of the user profile will allow the user to set up a social cooking event. The user can select the group within which to find friends with whom to cook; the genre of food to cook; and similar specifications. The app will provide suggestions for what to cook with whom, and it will allow users to schedule cooking meetings with the suggested users.
We think that a web-based system would be more accessible than a mobile application, as more users are likely to have access to the internet than web apps. Users are also likely to be arranging cooking meetings from their homes several days in advance, so a mobile app would not provide an advantage over a website. The tab system is well integrated into our current culture and should allow the users to navigate the website easily. By providing the option to sync with an existing calendar, we hope to facilitate scheduling for busy users. The abundance of recipe-sharing sites indicates that users find this useful, and we expect that our users would appreciate this feature being linked to the social cooking framework. We look forward to meeting with our users and discovering their thoughts on these issues.