A Mobile Application for Showing Recipes of Different Cultures: Foodily - Case Study Example

Student Name: Lecturer: A Mobile Application for Showing Recipes of Different Cultures: Foodily Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 Motivation 3 How it works 3 How to access recipes 4 Why so important 4 Target Audience and solution description 5 Target audience 5 Solution 5 Competitor Analysis 6 Strengths 7 Weaknesses 7 Opportunity 7 Threat 7 SWOT analysis conclusion 7 Conclusion 11 Motivation Foodily Recipe software allows a user to find out the appropriate recipe for a given of a particular dish. This app is provides recipes of different dishes including the major cultural dishes; including, but not limited to Chinese, Italian, Mexican, Australian, and many more. It is made in such a way as to be easy for the user to select a desired category of dish from the cultures. It is of great help to the user since they don’t spend a lot of time finding pin point search words. Bearing in mind that most apps reviewed have long algorithms rather than the self-directing Foodily, this app saves a lot of time especially where time is precious (A stitch in time saves nine; they say). How it works This app will show various categories of different cultures. The categories will be shown in form of representative/symbolic images with the names on the left back. When selected, different famous dishes are shown (mostly the first three dishes). Choosing the desired dish from the three then gives the recipe. The user is able to see a variety of images on a single recipe to give different impressions for that particular recipe. A user is able to review the app based on how helpful they find the app to be. This is done through rating. This kind of review enables the administrator to improve the application. How to access recipes The above description of the app is implicit of directly accessing the app from the mobile device. This is in line with an installed application accessible through browsing on the mobile applications interface. That is one of the ways of accessing recipes. Google searching the images is the other way of accessing the recipes. A user searching in images on google is able to directly access the app recipes. This is particularly a very important way of accessing the recipes since most people turn to the web whenever they need information. This feature therefore connects them to access of a more organized way of accessing recipes. This is particularly motivated by the fact that the web information is not as organized and that a user may need to research afresh in case of next need. This app would particularly be helpful in this course in that a user needs not remember the url nor save it somewhere. All they need to do is to get back to the app. No straining t remember anything (not even the recipe itself) because everything is with them on a mobile phone. Why so important In as much as the above descriptions give a glimpse at the motivation of having/creating this kind of app (algorithmically speaking), this app seems to be of high importance to quite many. Think of a person who, under whichever circumstances, needs to make a dish they aren’t so familiar with. They would perfectly make such a meal without any difficulty. Problem solved. Consider also a number of hoteliers with exposure gaps; they only need the app to get down the business. They do not need to go back to school or seek another person’s help. This therefore saves another nine. Not to forget that it saves a coin for them. What is even important, it is always updated. Conclusively speaking, this app is very important in our lives of interacting with other cultural meal demands. What is more, it makes life less expensive in getting the desired knowledge. The motivation behind creating this app give a glimpse of the audience and definitely the solution provided by the app. Target Audience and solution description Target audience This app is mainly created for anybody who expects to prepare a dish different from their custom dish. This therefore applies to families that anticipate visitors from other cultures. It also applies to hoteliers. They may need access to any recipe anytime. By extension therefore, this app would be gladly appreciated by hotelier students. Based on the fact that different people have different knowledge for different recipes, a person is able to post a recipe based on their user level. As an unregistered user, one is only able to see desired recipes. Users may also want to post recipes to their dishes of choice. Such users also form part of the target audience. Below is a solution description for this app. Solution Seeing the desired recipes is one of the solutions. Posting a recipe is another. In order to post a recipe, one must login using a password. This would enable easy tracking of owners of recipes as far as rating is concerned. A user with bad ratings can then be removed by the administrator. The users expect to see ratings of each recipe in order to know how much attention to accord the recipe. In order to optimize the ratings (avoid repeated ratings that is), every user who rates will submit a name which is used as a unique identifier to avoid repeated rating by a user. While posting a recipe, the user will have to fill a form which will be used to give the navigational structure of the app as earlier discussed. Apart rating the recipes, a user is able to review the app. A user is expected to leave their review as well as rating of the Foodily app. This helps the administrator take appropriate action as far as the overall reviews are concerned. After a user installs the app, they will then be able to use it as above described. For those who may access through the google image search, they will always be prompted to install the app. It is worth remembering that for someone to login, they will always need to have registered (just username and password). Before settling on this design of the app, a thorough review of apps serving similar purpose were reviewed as indicates the next chapter. Competitor Analysis Competitor analysis was done on the highest performing app (as indicated from comparative reviews and number of downloads) in this field. Paprika was the highest performing app that was deemed appropriate for this section. A S.W.O.T analysis for the app was considered the most effective way of doing a competitor analysis. In order to achieve this, user review was considered the most effective way. This has been the most effective way for benchmarking effective mobile application anyway. An app that doesn’t quite address the challenges is not quite appreciated by users. On this account, the intented design for the app was developed based on the SWOT analysis of Paprika with the results as shown below. Strengths Easy to search recipes by ingredients or source. Easy cross-referencing of recipes to come up with the most desired sample. Can send mails of recipes to someone. It easily integrates with other apps in the same domain. Use of familiar interface. Weaknesses The app does not store a lot of information. Priced for each OS. People do not make use of the advantageous google search. No way of importing recipes from online except for copy pasting manually. Opportunity Following the flaws in other apps such as pinterest and google cookbook this app stands chances of growing. Though the competition with other apps may be a setback, this app has unique features that make it stand very chance to grow. Threat Competing apps such as the Evernote which calculates the nutritional value. Free applications in the market serving similar purpose makes buying Paprika near impossible for those who notice dual existence of free and commercial apps in the same domain. SWOT analysis conclusion From the analysis of Paprika leads to a conclusion that the uniqueness of this app gives the chances of surviving the market dynamics. A user interface (UI) is very important. The user interface gives the exact impression of how the app will look like. The sketch of app (as developed using the wireframing tool; the Fuild software) as well the description shows how the UI will look is as shown in the next chapter. UI Planning Below is a diagram illustrating the UI of foodily. The FluidUI sketch shows some buttons which may require different actions for a better interactive interface. Some buttons such as the Recipe on the foodily front page and the rate buttons will be designed for tap. Different animations will be used as deemed appropriate for example, clicking the recipe button animates the categories page from the right to left with a zoom in. The rating button will pop in the rate result of yellow star depending on the rating level. Though not as profound, this app has some networking aspects. The fact that several users can review and item creates a network though restricted to that recipe. By user experience therefore, it can be concluded that this app has some elements of networking; an aspect that is very crucial in understanding its usefulness to the users. Conclusion From the analysis results and review of the UI, it is expected that this app will be found helpful and that it will be able to survive in the market. Read More