Introduction
A common problem facing many foreigners when they move to another country is that they are not familiar with the local food. Therefore, it is usually difficult for them to make decisions while shopping at stores since they have few ideas about what to buy and how to cook. To address this problem, our team is working on an application called ‘Cooking Advisor’. This application can be helpful when you are shopping for food at stores because all you need to do is to scan the QR code on the product and then Cooking Advisor will show you the name of this product, the common ways local people cook it, and other food or seasoning that is usually bought together with this product. Meanwhile, Cooking Advisor will also provide specific cooking guidance in texts, pictures and videos. All the services this application provided is to reduce the confusion people have towards cooking overseas and to help them save time as well as cost in buying the wrong things. In short, the application designers sincerely hope that with this application, all people will find it easy and fun to cook in foreign countries.
Application Evaluation
In order to evaluate the practicability and operability of this new product, the designers have done some marketing research such as target audience identification, interview feedback and competitor analysis. ** Target Audience The target audience of Cooking Advisor can be persons who study or work overseas, especially those who are new to the environment and unfamiliar with local food culture. Or, it can also be those who are not good at cooking and do not have much time to learn cooking from TV programs or cookery books. As a brand-new project, we want to launch it first in Australia. There are two reasons for this: firstly, our team members are all studying here and are more familiar with the situation; secondly, Australia itself is a huge market. According to statistics from Australian Government, more than 800,000 international students were enrolled in different programs in 2017. What’s more, this is just statistic for a single year. Because many students come to Australia for educational programs which last for more than one year such as bachelor degree’s program and master degree’s, there are even more international students staying Australia now. Apart from overseas students, tourists are also our potential users. In fact, the latest statistic shows that in 2017, 8.8 million tourists visited Australia (Tourism Australia 2017). Thus, considering the large number of people staying temporarily or for a long time in Australia, the estimated number of target audience of this project is 600,000.
** Early Feedback We interviewed ten people from four different countries and professions about ‘Cooking Advisor’, including a half number of Chinese. There are eighty percent people interviewed on the application situation all said the same thing about the very different world of cooking and buying foods. ‘Cooking Advisor’ relates to the users feeling that the application is helping them to cook or buy food faster and in an efficient manner. However, there might be some limitations of this application and they should be improved. In general, two kinds of suggestion for perfection are presented. First, those people who speak English as a native speaker suggest that the application do not only focus on the local food but also need to offer a menu of options. For example, local people want to use same ingredients to cook different style of the dish. Secondly, even English is divided into British and American English, same ingredients with different name such as scotch fillet is same as rib eye. Overseas students believe that available analyse of system similarity can improve the efficiency of ‘Cooking Advisor’ development. For example, people always use coriander for cooking, but not easy to find in Australia. The similar system can show them to replace it with local food parsley.
** Competition Powell (1995) believes ‘The earliest written recipes date from approximately 1600 BC and come from an Akkadian tablet from southern Babylonia’. Hundreds of thousands of cooking book are published with paper, online or application every year, those recipes has been our biggest competitor. People want to try cooking after watching the food program, and they will try to buy a cookery book to get those recipes. It always need to buy few new spices are used only once. For those oversea students are waste time and money to buy a book or spices. People can make one delicious dinner while they scan the QR code on the product in ‘Cooking Advisor’, also they can share their cooking tips or update a video. In addition, all ingredients are available based on their location when they are scanning product. ‘Relative to traditional book, people who use E-book for study that acquire skill better(Anderson & Krathwohl 2001). To sum up, ‘Cooking Advisor’ is more efficient and affordable.
Business Model
Because this project is for people living abroad, APP will try to earn money from overseas and markets. First, this software should work with supermarkets. Every transaction done by this software can give the designer Commission based on the amount of the sales. Second, the recommended recipes contain a variety of materials to promote purchases. Finally, this app can work with local restaurants to make special recipes to improve the popularity of the restaurant. As a return, the restaurants pay software creators advertising fees. In order to make our software active in the long run, software must improve user stickiness.,means must grasp users in a long term, when users buy a certain amount, they can get different rewards, and recommend different recipes according to different seasons and ingredients. The partner must be the largest-customer supermarket, such as COLES. In the early stage of software release, the first task is to increase the number of users. After a certain time, it can cooperate with food suppliers to transform business mode into O2O mode. When people can buy fresh and cheap goods directly, they can skip over the middle part, because it will be cheaper and do not need to spend time shopping in the supermarket.
Core Technologies
This software uses many technologies, first of all, QR code. To enable customers to use software more quickly, using QR code and scanning it is a good choice. System also use database technology, because after user scanning, the software needs to retrieve the appropriate resources and return the correct page (Walsh, 2010). In order to make our software more interesting, software also need to add AR technology. When the user successfully scans the code, it will jump out a series of AR interaction, and can also make use of AR technology to enable users to complete tasks to get rewards (Billinghurst, Clark & Lee, 2015). Of course, users can also share their satisfactory recipes with other application users, and users can get rewards through sharing recipes, which can improve user interest. GPS is also a very important function, because in different places, there are different materials, GPS can automatically locate. Otherwise, users can not match the local ingredients will spend more time looking for what they want. After successful positioning, local users can add friends and share experience to each other, and the software can organize local activities in a timely manner to enhance the stickiness of the users.
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