RecipeBook
Agrima
Digital Product Design
A popular Cooking App on Android Play store. It solves the recipe discovery problem with the help of Artificial Intelligence. The most prominent and distinguishing feature that made it stand apart from the competition is the Snap n Cook feature, where user clicks an image of an ingredient, it recognises and suggests the user best recipes which could be made out of that ingredient right away.
First Indian App to get Editors Choice in Google play store.
My Role
I joined the team as a UX developer, then later started focusing on product. The entire UX of the new app has been done by me. The latest version of Recipebook app is developed from the learning we got from the user behaviour data of previous version of app.
Challenge
There are tons of recipe apps in the playstore, getting attention and downloads requires a lot of work. Visual design and strategy plays an important role in acquiring initial set of users.
Icon
One of the most important design component of an app is its icon. Organic app downloads has lot to do with the App icon.
The old icon lacked excitement and was poorly designed, we didn’t put much thinking while designing the first version of the recipebook icon.
We made many iterations before arriving to the current logo. This was the time when google is pushing more material design philosophy and we were early adopters of that. So we wanted to have an icon which is simple, neat and unique.
The icon is basically a carrot with letter ‘r’ on top. Carrot is one of the prominent vegetables used across the world and it went well with our story.
We could say that the user engagement improved by 23% and 3x faster UX/UI design time after moving into material design.
Just changing the icon into material design improved installs by 18%.
This improvement was a case study for Google Material design and we were showcased recipebook design improvement story in multiple google events.
Recipebook being showcased in google events
Search
There are many ways where user finds a recipe in a recipe discovery platform. Browsing categories and searching for recipes through a search bar are the best ways to do that. While looking at initial set of usage analytics data we came to know that people are heavily using search bar but after searching they spend few more time scrolling these search results.
So we decided to improve our recipe search experience. Added more filters and sorting mechanisms in search results. Enabled autofill in the search bar, added trending and frequently searched recipes into it.
The search improvement drastically improved our app retention rates and reduced churn rates.
Contest
The most crucial thing for a cookbook app is content in the form of recipes. Recipebook followed a multiple approaches for sourcing content. Initially partnered with content contributors and recipe bloggers around the world for sourcing recipes. But those methods was slower and not very cost effective.
Then we introduced recipe contests into recipebook platform. Users can upload recipes into the platform and participate in different recipe contests and win prizes. This was in fact the most successful upgrade we have ever made to recipebook platform.
Before contest strategy the platform had around 3800 recipes, and after introducing contests and running that for a year the app made around 100,000+ recipes. We also created a community of recipe contributors and they are now actively contributing recipes into the platform.
Snap n cook
The most innovative feature of Recipebook app is snap n cook, which allows users to search for recipes in the form of images. The initial versions of recipebook app had a static image upload and search option, where users upload an image of a food ingredient to get recipes. Then we brought in multiple images upload option, but the experience was still not up to the mark. So we decided to redesign the whole snap n cook screen.
The latest Snap n cook screen is much more simple to use and effortless. We brought in dynamic image search which gives instant feedback to the users. The new version also allows users to scan multiple food ingredients at the same time.
Partnerships
