Young Designers 2011

		Young Designers 2011
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Saneef Ansari | mail@saneef.com

Cucumbertown

Information and Interface Design | PGDPD
Guide: Rupesh Vyas
Sponsor: Information Architects, Zürich

Keywords
Recipe
Online community
Information architecture
Interaction design

For my diploma project, I had to develop an online platform for cooking enthusiasts, from rookie cooks to celebrity chefs, which would help them to share, showcase and refine their creations. The brief was to give form to the idea of community for cooking enthusiasts. The project endeavours to build a community of food-lovers who can speak the language of recipes’.

At the outset, the plan of action was discussed with the project’s stakeholders. A preliminary research on users and cooking recipes was conducted. This was followed by the iterative process, which entailed designing a minimum viable product, developing and releasing it, collecting the feedback, refining it and re-iterating. After the user analysis and primary research, I had to identify the best structure, sensible content groupings, and relationships between content chunks and navigation. The design needed to be useful, efficient and provide a user-friendly interaction environment for the platform. I had to further translate the design into code, using HTML, CSS and Javascript.

The platform is composed of means to share, edit, expand and review the recipes. It also provides a vast knowledge base for culinary art, which will be collaboratively written by the users, to support the platform. Users can showcase their recipes through cookbooks, engage in discussions, and join different circles, based on their taste, skill, and reputation. I had to conceptualize the product, design the user interactions and develop the front-end with suitable technologies.

Through this project, I realized that although listening to users is very important in order to practise user-centred design, one cannot act upon every user request. If a request for a feature keeps coming back to you, it is time to look deeper and move forward.