Collaboreat

Software Team:
5 SW teammates

UX Team:
5 UX teammates

Time:
4.5 days

Project Overview

This is a cross-team collaboration hackathon competition held by General assembly. The project lasted for 4.5 days. The theme of the competition is automation. We have 5 UX teammates and 5 programmers in our team. The project started from user research, UX UI design to a working native APP.

Our Story

What's a daily task that many of us find challenging? Family meal planning. Crafting a meal plan for your loved ones can be a daunting task, particularly when catering to various dietary restrictions and picky eaters within the family.

What if there was a solution? Imagine an app that allows you to effortlessly record your family's food preferences and dietary restrictions. This app seamlessly coordinates with your family members, taking their food preferences into account, and then automatically offers a variety of tailored meal recommendations.

Feature Inventory

Which APP allow users to collaborate and make meal decision?

We conducted comprehensive market research, analyzing platforms such as Yummly, Prepear, Paprika, Mealime, Samsung Food, and Eat This Much. All the competitors are able to make meal plans and provide recipes. Four out of six competitors are able to create or follow communities and set personal food preferences. But none of them provides the function to allow users to communicate and collaborate with each other to make the meal decisions."

User Interview Quotes

Exploring Challenges and Frustrations in Household Cooking

We interviewed five users who have households ranging from two to six members and are frequent cooks. Here are some key insights were discovered from the interview.

Primary Persona

Age: 36

Occupation: Office Manager

Family: Married with 3 children (aged 6, 9, 12)

Challenges:

  • Balancing full time job with family responsibilities

  • Finding recipes that match family’s varying tastes

  • Lack of time to plan and prep meals

Needs:

  • Healthy meals that family will like

  • More organized approach to meal planning

  • Fast access to new recipe recommendations

Motivations:

  • Reduce stress from meal planning

  • Spend more time with children

Maryanne’s family often has many different needs and preferences when it comes to choosing food or recipes for meal plans, Maryanne needs a better way to coordinate and plan meals around her family’s food preferences because she is busy and doesn’t have a lot of time to research and find recipes that will fit everyone’s tastes.

Problem Statement

Wireflow

Here is the wireflow for signing into the app, setting up food preferences, selecting meals and group members, and then generating recipe suggestions for the family's meal plan.

Explore the prototype

This prototype illustrates Maryanne planning meals for her family through the following steps:

  • Sign in to the Collaboreat app

  • Edit personal food preferences

  • Start the meal planning process (home page)

  • Choose a meal

  • Select the people to join the meal

  • Generate recipes based on everyone's food preferences

  • Choose recipes for the meal plan

  • Review the details of the selected recipes

Next Step

Due to the limited timeline for this hackathon competition, if we had more time, we would continue to develop and prioritize the following features for implementation:

  • Providing an ingredient list for recipes

  • Suggesting recipes based on users' existing ingredients

  • Integrating with InstaCart

  • Creating a shared calendar with meal plans and recipes

  • Supporting group recipe suggestion generation

  • Offering suggestions based on chats between users and their food/nutritional preferences.

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