Cooking With Friends App

Product Manager and Designer, Cornell University Fall 2012

For the final assignment in INFO 3450: Human-Computer Interaction, students were assigned semester-long group projects for which each group designed and prototyped an app of their choosing. My group decided on creating Cooking With Friends, a collaborative online cooking application that brings users and their respective recipes and tasks into one place. The project went through several design iterations and our work included all aspects of UX design and testing. 

Cooking With Friends contains five primary features that enable users to have a smooth and easy collaborative cooking experience: recipe input/personal recipe database, cooking party organization, progress checklist, assistive functions panel, and social networking. It can be used for working on just one recipe or numerous recipes that will be combined to make an elaborate food item or a meal. Additionally users can work separately on their tasks in their different locations until it is necessary for multiple parts to come together. 

This project was a great learning experience as it went through all aspects of UX design and provided hands on experience with various forms of user testing (e.g. the Wizard of Oz technique). We went through several iterations of our designs, which were influenced by heuristic evaluations, user testing, and feedback from instructors. The iterations can be seen in the accompanying pictures, where the order of programs in which they were conceived was Balsamiq, PhotoShop, and finally InVision. Only the final page designs were redone in high fidelity as the major aesthetic themes were constant throughout the app