We drew on the lessons learned from our interviews to create a mental model of our user, the aspiring cook, and to develop a mood board. The mental model followed the user's thought process behind looking up a recipe, and the mood board was a collage of ideas from all the group members on what we thought should go into the design process.

Mental Model

A girl (maybe named katie around 22 yrs old) just got out of college and moved away from her parents for her first real job. Her parents helped her to move in and they told her that they were going to come visit in a few months or in the future (perhaps on a holiday). So, katie wants to impress them by cooking an amazing meal for them. However, she is only a beginnger cook. She doesn’t know much about it, except how to make cuponoodles or mac&cheese or desserts from a box so she stumbles upon our website and learns how to cook starting from beginning (easy) to end (hard). and when her parents come, they are VERY impressed.

  1. Katie wants to make a good dinner but she is a beginner cook. She needs to get better at cooking in order to impress. How is she going to cook better? She needs to progress.
  2. Find beginning recipes and perfect them so that she can progress to another stage. (Evaluate after completeing recipes to know when she can try harder recipes)
  3. Find medium recipes (evaluate)
  4. Find hard recipes (evaluate)

Mood Board

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full_mood_board