Reciplore is an app that's informed and influenced by an understanding of what people need to break the cultural barriers of food. The beauty of design thinking is that it's human-centered and we have the opportunity to reframe the problem from the customers point of view.

I designed this app to help users to feel confident and comfortable learning about different ethnic cuisines while ordering at restaurants or cooking at home. Its core functions aim to bring community, search easily according to your catered taste profile, and make food more accessible with guides to users.

Reciplore is an app that's informed and influenced by an understanding of what people need to break the cultural barriers of food. The beauty of design thinking is that it's human-centered and we have the opportunity to reframe the problem from the customers point of view. I designed this app to help users to feel confident and comfortable learning about different ethnic cuisines while ordering at restaurants or cooking at home. Its core functions aim to bring community, search easily according to your catered taste profile, and make food more accessible with guides to users that would otherwise be incomprehensible to them.

Reciplore, resolving the cultural disconnect of food.

Solution: The user's information is spent for a more curated exploration result specifically for the user to better communicate, comprehend, and feel while ordering/making food in restaurants with cultural barriers. The taste profile seeks to give recommendations and warnings through the users choices, but it still gives the user control over redoing and filtering their options later on in the homepage.

Below lists explanations of how the design is a solution to aforementioned pain points and problems across the user experience:

• The taste profile builds confidence as per the Maslow's hierarchy of needs by listing concrete steps to be carried out
• Microinteractions help users journey through the process (inactive vs. active buttons when questions are being filled out, colours fill in users tap a filter/option, progress bar as the user goes through the onboarding)
• Provides accessibility filters to find preferences in atmosphere, diet, and food allergies
• Plethora of food filtering options as users swipe right (for content in galleries, users like to swipe right)
• Easily learn additional information (ingredients, restaurant options, recipes, etc) through help buttons about each dish
• Clear, simple, and concise design that helps users embrace the adventure

Problem: Linguistic and cultural barriers appear when someone unfamiliar with their new environment begins to explore ethnic restaurants. Reciplore wants to break these barriers and make food more accessible. Here are some key points that I had in mind while designing these screens:

• Help users search more confidently for food and beverage establishments according to your taste profile, with tap filtering and location services
• Provide a pronounciation guide for items on menu for ease of use and comfort
• Have visual depications of each dish through photos
• Recommendations can be sorted from people of a similar, ethnic background
• Able to easily see reviews and ratings for dishes
• QR codes and scanning features for menus are available

To unpack this problem further, I first set out to gather qualitative data and insights related to the goal to aid in the design approach and to understand the problem space. The objective of this primary research is to understand the common thoughts or resolutions that target users may have. The food industry is all about human connection and hospitality, so I narrowed the target users to five "Yelp Elite Squad" members and five food-curious students to focus on building a product for foodies and curious taste seekers. This is my first step to understsanding other perspectives and it helped me a lot in being able to negotiate and communicate with others effectively. I asked the following questions:

My second step in research was to take a look at the existing products that would be the competitors of Reciplore. In a product critique, there is a lot to go over but I looked at the pros and cons — uncovering the product's core objective, how they were using the best design practices, and how accessible the app was.

To expand on this idea of why users fail and understand them better, I built personas to create reliable and realistic representations of who would be Reciplore's key audience segments for reference. These representations were based on qualitative and some quantitative user research.