mypantry

Phase I: Analyzing Users, Competitors, and Initial Designs

Introduction

MyPantry is a web app currently in development with the main goal of helping users find recipes based on ingredients they already have at home. To help with the early stages of development, we the UX team (Todd Lange, Ethan Nguyen, and Dylan Wright) put together this report to summarize our early findings regarding potential users and existing competitors as well as potential directions for the development of MyPantry.

Method

To gain insight into our competitors and potential users, two main methods (competitive analysis and heuristic evaluation) were conducted.

In the competitive analysis, we examined four products that have similar goals to MyPantry. For each competitor, we took note of the quality of the service as well as the general user experience. The competitive analysis helped us gain insight into the current market landscape and competitors, the demand for a service like MyPantry, and potential areas of focus in order to take advantage of competitor shortcomings.

The heuristics evaluation was used to determine whether or not a UX design satisfies its users’ needs. The purpose of our heuristics evaluation was to evaluate a leading competitor of our product (SuperCook) and determine what it did well and what it did poorly with regards to fulfilling user needs.

Findings

From our competitive analysis, we learned that there are a lot of products offering a similar service to MyPantry. Products like SuperCook, MyFridgeFood, and Half Lemons are all relatively established in this space and provide the basic functionality of generating recipes based on ingredients available to a user.

• Of the three main competitors, SuperCook has the largest existing user base with 1 million plus downloads.
• All three of the main competitors we looked at did not have a way for users to create their own recipes.
• SuperCook and MyFridgeFood both had reported issues with crossover between desktop and mobile interfaces (Half Lemon is only available on mobile devices).
• All three also did not have any functionality relating to common allergens, a feature that could be helpful in households that occasionally need to limit their available ingredients.
• MyFridgeFood has a helpful “decider” tool that allows users to narrow down recipes by asking them a series of questions (such as, are you under time constraints, do you want something simple, etc.). While this tool could be useful, we found it to be lacking in some areas. The questions were relatively simple, they all only accepted “yes” or “no” responses, and only three questions were asked; this may not be specific enough for a user to find it helpful.
• Another product we looked at, Pantry Check, offers features for managing household ingredients with features like expiration date tracking, restock suggestions, and accurate item prices. These features are adjacently related to our main goal with MyPantry; there may be an opportunity for MyPantry to bridge the gap between these two sets of features.

In our heuristic evaluation, the competitor we evaluated (SuperCook) scored high in a lot of the categories of the heuristic evaluation. The competitor fulfilled its user needs in a very simple and straightforward way. While there was a lot good about the competitor we evaluated, there were some things that could have been added to further improve it.

• The tasks of selecting ingredients and searching for recipes are clearly delineated despite being on the same page. This makes the status of what you are doing pretty clear and is good for efficiency since the entire product is contained on a single webpage.
• The website is pretty well mapped to the real world as the ingredients are separated into categories. Some ingredients are even included in multiple different categories which we think greatly increases efficiency for the user. The recipe cards also include pictures along with the name of the recipe similar to how they would exist in an actual recipe book.
• User freedom is pretty limited considering the simplicity of the service the competitor provides. For example, users are not allowed to simply browse the recipes that the competitor has to offer. This loss of freedom detracts from the overall usefulness of the competitor’s product.
• The competitor’s product as a whole is consistent and there is no question about what action will lead to what. It is straightforward and to the point.
• While the ingredients are listed so the user can easily recognize them by name, we feel that user recognition could be further enhanced.
• Using the competitor’s product isn’t necessarily the most optimized and efficient experience, but it is pretty flexible thanks to redundancy in the way you can accomplish the same tasks.
• Overall, we found the design of the competitor’s product to be very minimalist which made it very learnable. The color palette chosen, however, was atrocious.
• There are no error message pop-ups to notify the user when an error has occurred. For example, trying to search for recipes with no ingredients in your pantry does not work and the system does not notify the user that they first need to select ingredients.
• There was also no documentation. While the product is simple and straightforward, a simple ‘getting started’ page or pop-up would greatly enhance the user experience.

Conclusions

MyPantry has a lot of competition but all available products also have shortcomings that MyPantry could capitalize on. While we believe that the main focus of MyPantry should be getting a working set of the core functionalities that would satisfy the needs of the majority of users, (e.g. being able to add ingredients and search for recipes based on those ingredients), we also think there are a few key areas of focus where implementing certain niche features would be helpful to a large percentage of users and set MyPantry apart from our competitors.

Looking at our leading competitor, general areas of improvement include adding shortcuts for more experienced users to accomplish tasks more efficiently, including ingredient images for users to better recognize the ingredients they are selecting in their pantry, and better integration between mobile and desktop devices. Potential features that might set MyPantry apart include the ability for users to create their own recipes, emphasis on allergen in recipes, a tool to help users narrow down available recipes, and incorporation of features that help manage a pantry.

Caveats

While we firmly believe in the conclusions arrived at in this report, there are a few important caveats to note.

Regarding all findings in our competitive analysis, we have not observed how a regular user interacts with these competing services. All findings were drawn from our own interaction with these services as well as an examination of user reviews. It is possible that a regular user would not find issues with the things we believe our competitors could improve upon.

Regarding all findings in our heuristic evaluation, the process of conducting a heuristic evaluation may have influenced the design of our product to be more similar to our competitor than intended. If there are issues in design with our competitors that we overlooked, it is possible that those issues also exist in our designs.