Savor

1. Prototype link (Please submit a link to a playable prototype, not a link to your design file) Link

2. Describe your project (max 150 words)

Savor is an AI-powered meal planning assistant that decreases the stress associated with meal planning, grocery shopping, and recipe researching. Planning what to eat for the week is more than just time consuming – it’s daunting, stressful, and often leaves us feeling aimless and unsatisfied. Savor creates highly customizable meal plans, grocery lists, and recipes, whether you’re searching for your comfort zone or hoping to get out of it. With Savor you can log dietary restrictions, set up a weekly budget, save and find favorite recipes, and generate perfectly organized grocery lists. Generated grocery lists are automatically organized uniquely to the layout of your local stores to help you shop efficiently. It also compares prices between stores to help you make the best shopping decisions for your budget. With the help of Savor, you can savor food and save time!

1. Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources. (Max 500 words)

Research Survey Link: https://forms.gle/ERKLDDhaYQkxjXgZ8

To begin our process, we discussed processes in our lives that we found difficult on a day-to-day basis which we felt inhibited our time to be human. Having seen online videos and posts about using AI to help with meal planning, we were inspired to turn our efforts towards an AI-assisted meal planning and grocery app. Proprietors of these methods suggested that with the help of AI users were able to do more in their day and not stress about what they were going to eat. Our research process included a google form survey as well as 1-on-1 discussions of personal struggles with the meal planning and grocery shopping processes. We made use of multiple choice selections, short answer questions, and 1-10 difficulty scales. We asked survey participants for their input on what they found to be most difficult about grocery shopping and meal planning individually, as well as their personal meal planning habits.

We found that 60% of participants practice meal planning in some capacity, with the vast majority doing it on a more casual basis. 75% of participants indicated that they found meal planning to be of above average difficulty. Between grocery shopping and meal planning together, deciding what to eat or purchase far exceeded other pain points. Because of this data, we focused our efforts on automatic meal-plan generation and assisted recipe and cuisine discovery.

We also found a correlation between participants who identified as being neurodivergent or disabled and dissatisfaction with meal planning and grocery shopping. On average, neurodivergent and disabled participants rated both of these categories over 1 point higher in difficulty on a scale of 1-10 than the combined average. (5.14 score for grocery shopping difficulty, and 7.14 score for meal planning difficulty). This data in combination with our personal experiences helped us focus our efforts on creating a process that was as straightforward and guided as it was customizable.

1. Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words)

Our most important design decisions were creating a vibrant visual style guide, Adding cuisine selection and discovery features, and allowing robustly customizable chat bot interactions, preferences, and dietary restrictions. Our research indicated to us that participants wanted more variety in their foods, but had trouble discovering new cuisines and recipes. We had multiple short answer responses requesting features aligned with this sentiment and expressing general frustration with food-related decision making. To design for this issue, we created a favorites system for recipes and cuisines. We also created an example conversation with Savor Bot that emphasized AI’s ability to help make these decisions simpler for users. Creating an easily manageable and visual tagging system for dietary restrictions was also a must. The idea is that Savor can do more than just create meal plans, grocery lists and budgets, it can also interpret requests for food discovery, usage of already owned food items in recipes, updates to user preferences, etc,.

Our survey also indicated that many are still uncomfortable with the usage of AI. The user needs to feel like they’re fully in control of the whole process. To support this experience, preferences, favorites, and grocery lists can be manually adjusted at any time by the user. Browsing recipes can also be done manually.

Savor’s visuals are strikingly colorful, while the font is standard and readable. We wanted to make sure to blend style with simplicity. In order to build our brand identity, it was important for our team to create a style guide and color palette with strict rules for spacing, font sizes, and color usage. Our goal was to present an array of colors that represent the many colors found in our meals every day. Our logo is a representation of the “finger purse”, a common hand gesture in Italy. It has become an internationally regarded symbol of both question and excellence, and is associated with a ‘chef’s kiss’, which is exactly the reaction we hope users will have as they smoothly navigate the suddenly simple trials and tribulations of meal planning and grocery shopping.

Built With

• figma