plant-based made easy.
eatgreen is a mobile application that promotes and facilitates the transition to a more plant-based diet.
With eatgreen, users customize their dietary preferences and goals, and the application provides personalized recipe recommendations and shopping lists based on these parameters.
eatgreen serves as a convenient hub for grocery lists and recipes while providing encouragement to achieve your plant-based dietary goals.
Check out the prototype here!
about the project.
At the time of eatgreen’s development, I had recently adopted a fully plant-based diet. Although I was very enthusiastic about plant-based eating when I decided to eliminted meat and animal products from my diet, I found the transition to be confusing and, at times, frustrating. I didn’t know what to buy when shopping for groceries, or what to eat for breakfast in the morning or for lunch at work. I found a few vegan recipes that I was excited to try, but they all required ingredients that I was completely unfamiliar with, and for the most part, way too time-consuming to prepare. This project aims to offer a service that I could have benefitted from not only then, but now as well.
comparative analysis
Inspiration for this project was drawn from comparable services budgetbytes and Tasty, both web and mobile applications that make it easy to find recipes and include grocery list features. I aimed to apply some of their principles to my project, such as the way in which recipes are presented and categorized, as well as the ingredient index. Additionally, both budgetbytes and Tasty feature vegan and vegetarian categories from which I could source recipes! However, instead of simply offering a convenient way to find recipes and create grocery lists, my project caters to those interested in a plant-based diet and offers more personalized content for a practical and individualized transition.
design challenges
As a design student then-unfamiliar with iOS and mobile application design conventions at the onset of this project’s development, a self-assigned project to design and prototype an original app was admittedly ambitious. Beyond that, I aimed to achieve the highest degree of synergy between the product’s functionality and design, clearly communicating it’s functionality through its design. I approached every design decision from the perspective of not only functionality, but of the product’s purpose as well. Through its design, I wanted to clearly communicate the message of the application - encouragement and support in transitioning to plant-based diet. Most importantly, however, I aimed to implement a level of accessibility and a sense of inclusivity to all users. These were the challenges I faced at every level of the development process, from conceptualization to prototyping.
development
The application prototype was created using InVision studio, and all assets such as the typeface and logo were workshopped and created using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Additionally, various icons were sourced from the web.
After spending some time roughly conceptualizing the project, I began drafting ideas for a variety of interfaces and systems in InVision Studio, a program that I had not used prior to this project. After the first session of brainstorming, the application’s first iteration featured a system in which the recipes and grocery list were two separate entities; much like the comps used for inspiration, the user would select recipes recommended to them daily, categorized by meal type, and generated based on dietary preference as well as the contents of the shopping list, which was generated separately from the recipes.
After receiving feedback and re-approaching the project, I drafted several different iterations of the project, including one with a core system in which the user is presented with a new grocery list once each week, generated based on dietary preference and progress, from which recipe recommendations are then generated daily. After testing this system in practice, I found that the more intuitive solution would be to allow the user to first choose their recipes for the week, recommended, of course, in accordance with dietary preference and progress, and then generate the grocery list from the recipes selected.
From this point, users can browse and add new recipes at any point in the week and add the ingredients to their shopping list, or simply add individual ingredients to the shopping list at will. The application’s core functionality now, in its current iteration, focuses on three things: the user’s progress towards a more plant-based diet, the recipes generated with these parameters, and the grocery lists generated from the recipes selected.
Thank you for reading! Please check out the eatgreen prototype here.