Zestipy App

The shorthand explanation for Zestipy — as it was told to me at a party earlier this year — is ‘Goodreads for recipes.’ David M — — , the app’s creator, wanted a home page that was simple and straightforward, allowing users to open and save recipes directly from the feed of posts fueled by their favorite authors and friends.

Goal

The goal here was simple. Since I had just met Dave at a party — and he was still waiting to hire a better app developer — I offered to design a quick home page feed for the Zestipy app as well as update what Dave already had for the recipe page. Since this work was truly freelance, I didn’t redesign the entire app since Dave’s development is still in progress.

Main Users

By talking to our other friends at the party, Dave and I came up with a couple of potential users who would be interested in the app. We figured most users would be in their late 20s to 30s — interested enough in cooking to need to save recipes and savvy to want to do so via social media.

Through roughly polling a few friends, we discovered that the majority of people interested in the app wanted to be able to rate recipes, share information, and quickly view how long a chosen dish may take to make. Every person we polled stressed the importance that the directions and ingredients list be easily accessible and not buried beneath several paragraphs of explanatory text as you might see on many cooking blogs.

Mockups & Redesigns

Since Dave hadn’t developed the home page yet, I took his concept of “AllRecipes meets Goodreads meets Instagram” and made a quick mockup of how the Zestipy home feed might look. I prioritized including the recipe time commitment in the top left corner of each of the images on the feed since that was what nearly everyone we talked to mentioned needing to see.

On the main toolbar I included a Search button, an Add button, a Cookbook button, and a Profile button in addition to the Home feed to make up the five main functions of the app.

I also redesigned what Dave already had developed in the app’s Recipe and Instructions view. I shrunk the text down to the default used by Apple and made sure the Instructions were shown on at least 50% of the screen since that was crucial to everyone we polled about the app. I also consolidated the ‘Cooking View’ from the original app and included it in the main Recipe view of my updated wire. It didn’t make sense for a user to open a separate page to find the recipe instructions, especially when so many people of the friends we spoke with mentioned not wanting to touch their phones while cooking.

The final redesign I did was of the ingredients list. I wanted it to function similar to Apple’s Notes app, with ingredient items disappearing from the list view as the user selected them and added them to the recipe.

Conclusion

This was a fun and free little update that allowed me to exercise my capacity for design away from the bland navy blue stuff that I do during my day job. The app is live, but still a long way off from being developed in the way Dave and I envisioned. Still, it’s fun to dream!