Cookbook

General Idea and Relevance (AB)

We all love to cook. At least some of us do. The members of our group are part of the cooking share of population and quickly we found out, that we have one problem in common. We use recipes from different sources at different occasions and if we like the recipe, we want to safe it. However exactly there hides the problem. How? How to bring all the different sources, from a physical cookbook up to the Instagrampost or Youtubevideo, into one place which we can access whenever we want to and wherever we want to. The solution has to be a digital Application. So we decided that we want to find out how such an App should be designed and organized in order to make cooking lifes easier for people. For our project we developed the following procedure. Our first step was to define a vision, a mission and our target group. To define a vision and a mission wasn’t to hard. For different reasons, it was more difficult to select a clear target group. First of all is cooking something that can’t be allocated to specific demographic or ethnographic groups, but to more or less every person old enough to cook. Secondly, it was hard to determine in which age group the use of recipes per se and the use of digital apps overlapped the most. We did than decide to organize our target group into two levels of age group. The main age group contents all people from 18 – 35 and the secondary age group targets people between 16 – 50. In Addition to that we said that people who would use such an App also have to have an affinity to cooking. In our whole target group all genders are involved. The following tools and instruments are described in detail later on in the documentation. For that reason we won’t go into detail in this chapter. To get more information regarding the cooking behaviour and recipe behaviour of the people from our target group we prepared a questionnaire and qualitative interviews. This information was the basis for our contextual inquiry and the development of the following focus group. The data collected by the contextual inquiry and the focus group was firstly used to set up four different personas, which we did in two rounds. The first rough personas were based on the contextual inquiry and were then extended by the data of the focus group. From that point on we merged all the data to develop our user stories. At the end there will be a display of our findings and also a critical assessment and reflection of our procedure. Prior to the start of our project we did a market research to validate the relevance of this topic. In our opinion the relevance was already partly given because of the topic of cooking itself. Additional to that there are a lot of recipe suggestion pages which we assumed are well known throughout our targeted age group. Examples are chefkoch.de, daskochrezept.de or pinterest.de, which is not necessarily a recipe suggestion page, but has a huge foody community. We also assumed Instagram and Youtube are highly frequented sources to find recipes. All these assumptions were confirmed throughout our procedure. However the most important finding of our market research was that there are two apps that provide that exact service we had in mind. They are called cookbook and kuri, which we didn’t know about in the beginning. On one hand that gave us a clear sign that this topic is relevant but on the other it felt like we now just copy other apps. After we analyzed the already existing apps we found a couple of things we would do differently, so we said we will create our own concept and try to even learn from the mistakes the developers of the cookbook app did.

Information and Pages

Paper https://docs.google.com/document/d/12BaOEmwlEK_YmgQ9fdLcZDb-7dTuh6yjUEQHTS0SWiY/edit

Conceptboard

Data analysis qualitative interviews:

https://app.conceptboard.com/board/y4g7-3tiq-32s4-9ts8-183e

Personas:

https://app.conceptboard.com/board/eras-ayi1-aiye-zn61-t5sy

Focusgroup / User Stories / Storyboards / Requirements:

https://app.conceptboard.com/board/2pry-8m88-eupp-c9u1-5ux6

The Project

Vision (AB)

We want to enable people to create their own cookbook, like Granny did.

Mission (AB)

With our application it will be possible to collect recipes from all sorts of different sources in a personalized cookbook.

Target Group (AB)

- Main Target Group: People 18 - 35

- Secondary Target Group: People 16 - 50

- Affinity for ingredients and cooking

- All Genders included

Contextual Inquiry (HH)

Our goal at the beginning was to find out the cooking behavior, eating behavior and possible use of a cookbook app of our target group. We decided to proceed with two different methods. First, we conducted a qualitative survey (Appendix 1) to get an overview of the previous behavior of potential users. The focus was on finding out frequencies and correlations of cooking and recipe usage behavior. It was also important for us to find out whether and, if so, which people would be interested in a possible app so that we could develop personas on this basis. We supplemented our survey with four qualitative interviews (Appendix 2). This allowed us to find out more information about cooking and recipe use behavior. The motivation and background to the cooking process and recipe behavior helped us gain a better understanding of the starting point. In the interview, we decided to use a first name with the subjects in order not to create distance in a very common topic. We created and transcribed the questionnaire and the qualitative interviews in German, since all of the group members were proficient in German at that time. Due to the expansion of our group by Hakan Mural, we continued to maintain our documents in English in the further course.

Quantitativ Questionnair: 

Due to our target group and the fact that the topic is easily accessible for many, we decided to distribute the online survey in our direct environment. The survey period was two weeks. After cleaning the data set, we were able to analyze responses from 37 respondents (N=37). The core findings are summarized below. The analysis was performed with the statistical program RStudio. We created the diagrams with Excel. Our questionnaire consists of three parts. Starting with demographic data, followed by questions about cooking behavior and questions about recipe usage behavior. Finally, we wanted to know if a potential app would be used. For the demographic data, 13 people indicated they identified as male. Twenty-four subjects selected female as their gender. None of our subjects checked the "diverse" box, which is why we neglected this group of people in our further analysis. The metric variable age was classified as part of the analysis and treated mainly as a discrete variable in the remainder of the analysis. Classifications have the advantage of better identifying correlations between subgroups and allow for better clarity. With classification, data is lost and there is a risk of data manipulation due to the Will-Roger phenomenon, for example. The age range 18-35 was completely covered. The age groups at the outer edges are the least represented, each with only 16% of the participants. The 23-26 age group is by far the most common. Due to the fact that the survey was distributed among our friends and acquaintances, this is not surprising since three out of four of our group members belong to this age group themselves. Not to be neglected is the fact that ages 19 and 20 are not represented at all. Moreover, the youngest age group, with four out of six subjects, consists mainly of 22-year-olds. This is not negligible in further analysis. In the youngest age group, only women are represented, but a correlation between gender and specific answers could not be found. In the other three age groups, both sexes were extensively represented. Most, 16, of our test persons cook between four and seven times a week, which makes it clear to us that cooking is an issue in our target group or is practiced regularly. 73% of our respondents use cookbooks or websites for cooking and thus refer to aids and information for preparing their food (Appendix 1: Figure 6). Nevertheless, it must be critically considered that subjects who answered this question in the negative may use other aids. Examples could be apps or printed recipes. This is the reason why in the next part- recipe usage behavior- all answers were evaluated. For the most part, the frequency of prescription use in physical form is marginally the case across all age groups. Abstract-frequency eight and nine were not named, while 6%, and thus one person, from the 23-26 age group always cooks with a physical cookbook. In addition, it should be noted that 81% of the respondents indicated one to three. This result shows that most of our respondents never or rarely use a physical cookbook to prepare their food. In contrast, when asked about the Internet recipe resource, only 16% indicated a value of one to three. Among the 31-35 age group, 67% reported Often (7-9) or Always cooking with recipes from the Internet. The sum correlation of 0.5 is reached at an indication of 7. That means that 50% or more of the respondents indicated cook often to always (7-10) with recipes from the Internet. However, it is questionable when our respondents use recipes. We suggested three different settings. First, cooking alone, cooking with others, or cooking for others. Multiple choices were allowed for the response option. Between 50% and 71% of the respective age groups stated that they use recipes when cooking alone. 71% of the respondents in the age group 23-26 cook together with others and are thus the group that cooks most often together with others. The greatest differences between the age groups prevail when cooking for others. The tendency shows that the older age groups cook for others more often than the younger ones. The frontrunners are the respondents between 27 and 30 with 86%. While between 67% and 71% of the 23-26 year olds cook in all three settings, there are clear differences in the other age groups. The age group between 18 and 22 cooks to 68% alone, 1/3 (33%) of them cook for others. Multiple choices were also possible when asked about a recipe system. The most popular way of saving recipes are screenshots and photos. This statement receives the highest percentage in all age groups. In the other rankings, there are differentiations between the age groups. While the age groups 18-22 and 27-30 prefer a mixture of bookmarks (online) and sticky notes (offline), and the age group 23-26 also uses these at 28%, the age group 31-35 uses write up/down/copy and file in a folder or memorize recipes. Remembering recipes was also ticked second most often among the 23-26 age group.

When asked "Have you ever wanted to cook a recipe but didn't have it at hand?" an arithmetic mean of 30% agreed. Subsequently, some of these subjects described a situation in which the recipe was missing. They described situations in which they wanted to explain dishes to third parties or cook for them abroad. Others had forgotten where they had found the recipe and could no longer find it. In our final question, we wanted to know if they would use an app/website that allows them to compile their own cookbook. The approval rating is 86% among respondents. In addition, there is a significant (0.048) correlation between potential use and age groups. Using the contingency coefficient, a correlation between the nominal scaled variable and the ordinal scaled variable could be tested. Correction with Fisher's test confirmed this correlation. With the help of the Cramer V test, a medium correlation could be proven (0.49). The younger the subjects, the higher the approval rating for possible use. No other correlations between individual variables were found during the evaluation. Finally, it should be noted that the scaling in our survey varied and did not always make sense. A scale from Never to Always would have been sufficient with five gradations.

Qualitativ Interviews: 

We conducted the four qualitative interviews with the same structure. In addition to demographic data, we wanted to obtain information about cooking behavior, recipe usage behavior, and initial information about our future app. We designed an interview guide that we divided into different sections. Each group member conducted a qualitative interview and recorded it. We then transcribed our recordings. Due to the age of the target group, we decided to scout test persons in our environment. Criteria for this were, in addition to age, the use of recipes and regular cooking. We decided to do individual interviews, no group interviews, to get spontaneous and free answers and to be able to really focus on this person. In addition, we wanted to avoid a "leader effect" and create a counterpart to the focus group. We also conducted them alone in order to create as relaxed a setting as possible for the subjects and thus provide the framework for a personal interview. The evaluation was done with the help of a table in which we clustered the collected information. Our categories were "Cooking process", "Recipe collection", "Motivation to cook", "Cooking Setting", "Motivation to use recipes", "Design/ Function Ideas" and "Other". The corresponding evaluation table with all contents and the transcribed interviews can be found in the appendix. To counteract subjectivity, we performed a communicative validation. Here we exchanged our transcriptions and checked that we worked similarly and came to similar conclusions. This validation was an attempt to obtain results that were as objective as possible.

Focus group (TL)

The quantitative and qualitative data already collected through our questionnaire and the interview serve as an optimal starting point for the development process of a prototype. However, in order to gain even more insight into the wishes of potential app users, it was useful to delve deeper using the method Focus Group. The latter is defined as "a research technique that collects data through group interaction on a topic determined by the researcher". (Morgan, 1996, p. 130) This method is not only suitable for the data collection in the project because of its interactive character, but also because focus groups can be used optimally complementary to other methods (ebd.) and thus can build on the previous results.

Preparation of the Focus Group

In this project, the focus group was not intended to serve as a mere deepening of already known requirements or wishes for a potential cookbook app. Rather, the session should enable potential requirements to be identified that have not yet emerged in the previous research process. Accordingly, the design of the session leaves room for the confirmation of already known requirements but also for the development of new ideas. Due to the different locations of the researchers as well as the presumably acquired persons in the future, it was agreed to conduct the session online. However, in order to ensure the interactivity mentioned by Morgan (1996) as particularly relevant, a Miro board serves as a tool to improve the interactive exchange [1]. Using this, the meeting could also be planned and prepared in advance in order to make the process as smooth as possible. Specifically, we agreed on 3 elements:

1. Ice Breaker / Quick Questions

Since a focus group can only be successful if all the people involved actively participate and share their views on a topic, an ice breaker is a good idea at the beginning. We have chosen "Quick Questions" around the topic of cooking and eating. These 5 questions are each written on a note on the Miro Board. A pile of empty Post-Its next to it is used by the test persons to write their answers to the questions and to assign them to the respective notes. The questions range from the song that describes the cooking style to the type of ice cream with which a person identifies and thus do not actually have anything to do with the app. However, they are meant to lighten the mood and playfully lead to the topic of cooking and recipes.

2. Group Discussion

Based on the results of our questionnaire and the interview, we have already gained an insight into the cooking behavior and recipe usage of the potential users. This partly superficial overview will be deepened in this part to further concretize the personas. The test persons are asked at this point how exactly their cooking behavior and recipe use looks like. In order to create a structure, we have divided the point into the three time-based sections "Before cooking", i.e. for example the search for the recipe, during cooking and after eating. A final category, "Extra Ideas," serves as our guide if suggestions for a possible cookbook app already fall during this part. This part of the Focus Group is also visualized and can be completed with post-its. However, it was important to us here that the participants get into a conversation about the topic and are not just busy writing. In order to promote a good exchange, we therefore agreed that members of the research group would write the answers on the Post-Its and also formulate concrete questions about the steps as food for thought.

3. Scenario

In the last part of the focus group, the cookbook app will be discussed in detail. Here, the participants' opinions about the basic need for such an app as well as wishes and ideas are going to be collected. For this purpose, two scenarios are presented to the participants: One is the situation of coming home after a long day and wanting to prepare dinner for oneself. The second situation describes friends coming over for an evening of cooking together. Again, both scenarios are divided into the temporal sections "Before cooking", "During cooking" and "After cooking". For both scenarios and each step, the participants are asked to discuss how an app could support them. Responses can again be recorded by research group participants on post-its and assigned to the appropriate section.

Acquisition of participants 

For the people invited to the Focus Group, we were guided by the target group of the app. This means that the most important prerequisite was the age and the desire to cook. In order to collect many ideas, but to allow a good flow of conversation, especially in the online setting, we agreed on a number of participants of 8 people. In the invitation, the people were only informed about the date and the scheduled time period as well as our basic intention to develop an app that has a connection to the recipe collection. We did not want to go into more detail, so that the answers and reactions of the participants would be unprepared and authentic. For the first scheduled date (05.06.2023) not enough people could be recruited. After this was moved back a week (12.06.2023), 7 people accepted. In the end, 6 people took part, 4 of them female and 2 male. All of the participants fell into the target group of the cookbook app.

Procedure of the Focus Group

The Focus Group took place on 12.06. from 6 pm and was scheduled for 1 ½ hours. Since some participants arrived a little later, the meeting lasted 1 hour and 45 minutes. After a declaration of consent from the participants, we were allowed to record the meeting and can now reconstruct it exactly and thus also analyze the results better:

At the beginning we briefly introduced our team and the project and then we started with the Quick Questions. This part lasted about 15 minutes and our desire to lighten the mood and get everyone actively involved was successful (Appendix 3: Figure 1). The second part, which was intended to record more precisely the cooking and recipe behavior of the people, lasted about 45 minutes. Here it became clear that although all participants belong to the target group, there are clear differences in the way they currently deal with recipes. While a part already tries to collect everything as digitally as possible, there are people who bring the digital recipes by printing or copying them into the digital world to design them themselves. In this first part, some ideas for possible functions of the app were already mentioned (Appendix 3: Figure 2). This was then deepened in the third part, which lasted about 35 minutes. Here, in the group setting, it was possible to observe which ideas only individuals thought were good ideas and which were basically approved of by everyone (Appendix 3: Figure 3). We were also able to include this in the evaluation through the video.

Utilization of the results of the Focus Group

Focus Group was a significant step for us in prototyping, as it partially changed our view of the app. Using the video and the Miro board, we conducted the following evaluations:

- The group discussion served us to better understand our potential users and their current behavior, and thus to specify the personas again

- The Post-Its regarding the potential app, which we collected especially during the scenarios, but also partly during the group discussion, were evaluated in a table. In this table we clustered the respective statements into "Need", "Wish" and "Idea". This makes it easier to see which comments are actually relevant for the smooth use of the app and which would be nice to have, but are not quite as relevant at first. The next step is to agree on which of the mentioned "Wishes" and "Ideas" should already be considered in the first prototype.

When looking at the results, it is particularly worth mentioning that a completely new dimension was revealed for the app, namely the app as a digital pantry. It was pointed out several times that it is particularly desirable for the optimal interaction between recipe and cooking that this is either explicitly tailored to the food available or at least that an app displays which of the ingredients mentioned are already at home and which still need to be purchased. Two factors are relevant here - an interface between the cookbook app and an app in which you can create shopping lists and that the available food can be tracked. Here, too, the next step will show to what extent we can implement this.

Critique

​​In general, we were able to gain interesting insights and are therefore very satisfied with the procedure of the Focus Group. The points that should be mentioned critically were, firstly, the following: The length of the interview and the possible presence of social desirability. In the last quarter of an hour it was clearly noticeable that only a few people participated attentively in the discussion, as the rest were already tired from the previous conversation. In addition, the content of the interview could have been influenced by the fact that we recruited people who knew us and therefore answered more socially desirable than strangers. However, the latter should be negligible for the not too private topic of "cooking".

Personas (HH)

Based on our findings from the survey, the qualitative interviews, and the focus group, we created different personas. The different fictional characters represent different types of users. We created a primary persona, a secondary persona, a supplemental persona, and a non-persona. For each persona we compiled information on five categories (https://app.conceptboard.com/board/eras-ayi1-aiye-zn61-t5sy). At the beginning, we were guided by the evaluations of our survey. Then, we assigned each qualitative interview to an appropriate persona to complement it. We used the results of the focus group to add further details. Especially the "wishes for the app" could be shaped by the results of the focus group. In addition, after the focus group, we added the persona "Nina", because until then we had not considered printing and collecting recipes based on our previous analysis. In the following, we briefly describe the personas with their characteristics. Our Primary Persona is the student Nora, 22. We decided to use a young persona because of the correlation between age and a possible use of the app. In our survey, the younger group was mainly represented by 22-year-olds. It is important to Nora to have fun cooking and that it is cheap. She likes to cook with friends and only uses digital recipes. She likes to throw the odd theme party where people cook together. Noah, 32 years old, is our secondary persona. He likes to cook alone and collects his recipes with post actual and digital at the same time. He uses recipes for ingredients he rarley uses, but wants to eat them. He also uses Youtube as a source for his recipes. Our supplemental persona "Nina", is 25 years old. She likes to take time to cook and doesn't like to haste. She uses physical folders to collect recipes. Our non-persona is "Norbert" and he is not part of our target group. He is a family man and most of the time his wife cooks. He would not use an app for recipes, as he only cooks under the guidance of his wife.

User Stories (AB)

At the outset, it should be noted that all the graphics including the actual user stories can be found in the appendix. To get an overview of the requirements for our app and to develop scenarios which are valid and as close as possible to reality, it helps to find out how software features would be seen through the eyes of an user. The target is to find out who wants to do what and why. That’s also the typical build up of an user story. It must contain the user, a function and a target. An user story is basically a set of requirements for a piece of software that relates exclusively to the user’s point of view. A combination of user stories is called an use case. User stories can be stated on user story cards. An user story map is a way to illustrate all of the user stories to keep an overview. It builds the basis for the actual translation of user stories into software. For our user stories, we had a lot of information from the focus group and from the qualitative interviews. The first step was to merge all the different data we found. The results were countless, not clustered ideas which were partly the same, partly not or unrealistic. Following that we had to organize this data somewho and we decided to cluster and classify them. To classify the different ideas we collected, we developed three stages of importans. The really basic and necessary, maybe even mandatory, requirments were labeled as “Needs”. An example for a need was the suggestion to be able to share your cookbook or recipe folder with your friends. The user story for this feature could be “As an user of the app, I want to be able to share my recipes with my friends in order to stay connected”. The suggestions for more advanced features which are not essential to make use of the app were labeled as “Wishes”. An user story for a wish feature could be “As an user of the app, I want to comment on other people's recipes in order to enhance the recipe”. The really advanced features, some of which would even be difficult to program, were labeled as “Ideas”. “As an user of the app, I want to be able to group chat with my friends in order to organize a party” could be one example for that classification.

Results

Our User Stories are to be found in the appendix Nr. 5 or through the link of the conceptboard "Focus Group".

Reflection of Methods

In this part we want to shortly reflect on the method user stories.

        Pros

A big plus for user stories is, that you can develop them with varying degrees of detail and they can be adapted easily. The basic idea of thinking problems or tasks from the perspective of an user, creates a deeper connection between the developing team and the people the software is developed for, leading to a very simple description of tasks everyone understands and makes implementing of functions tremendously easier. The user stories are basically a tool to develop a common language for all stakeholder on your project function wise.

        Cons

A minor problem with user stories is, that even though the target is to look through the eyes of an user, the person who develops the user stories is just not the targeted user. Therefore it's a translation of information gathered into what we think the user would want to do.

Scenarios & Storyboards (TL)

Based on our basic ideas about the app and the Contextual Inquiry, we were able to develop 3 different Scenarios. Through our Focus Group, we were able to specify these even more precisely. These can also be assigned to the respective personas:

1. Self-Care in the kitchen

Nina arrives home in the early evening after work. The day was exhausting, but she doesn't feel like going to bed yet. She is looking forward to having a quiet evening without appointments or other big plans. To do something good for herself, she wants to cook a great dinner. She looks in the fridge and sees, among other things, feta and tomatoes. Then she remembers that just the other day she saw a great recipe for feta pasta on YouTube and saved it in the "After work recipes" folder in her cookbook app. She quickly checks to see if all the other ingredients are there for this relatively easy recipe - jackpot. The self-care evening can begin.

2. Together is the most fun

One of the bi-monthly highlights is coming up. In Nora's friend group, the 6 friends gather every other month in one of their kitchens and cook dinner together. Each time they have a special theme - this time it's Harry Potter. Since the theme has been set, they have been busy collecting recipes in their respective cookbook apps that fit the theme and bring the wizardry into the kitchen. Using the share function, they can show each other the recipes and vote on exactly what the magical meal will look like. In the app, the friends can also agree on who gets which ingredient - so the kitchen party can really get started!

3. Cooking something for good friends

Noah is already extremely looking forward to the coming weekend. Finally, his good friend from home and their new partner visit him - that must be a special evening. He wants to conjure up a very special meal for the two of them and is therefore very happy that he has backed up all the family recipes in the “Mama’s kitchen secrets” folder in the app. Besides the high protein recipes he usually pre-cooks, Mom has the best recipes and he has saved them in the app especially for such cases. So he can easily transfer everything from the recipes to his shopping list, get the ingredients and thereby conjure up a great menu with appetizer, main course and a small dessert for the two.

In order to make the user stories that were already described in text in the scenarios even more tangible and clear, we visually represented them in three storyboards sketched out on paper [2]. These are oriented to the Scenarios, but have also influenced them retroactively. When creating these, we noticed, for example, that in Scenario 2 we didn't go into detail about how the ingredients were divided among the friends at the cooking evening so that there wouldn't be any chaos at the end. This has been adjusted.

Requirements (TL)

The requirements for the cookbook app were determined in two ways. Firstly, analytically through all the previous sources such as Contextual inquiry, Personas & Scenarios and especially the table with the "wishes", "ideas" and "desires" of the participants generated on the basis of the Focus Group. In addition, we also proceeded creatively by looking at our 3 scenarios and adding the respective requirements in a table as well as prioritizing them. For this chart we have defined data needs, functional needs, product qualities and constraints [3].

At this point, we finally agreed that the original idea of the app as a "digital cookbook" would be expanded by two additional dimensions: The app as "digital pantry" and "social ingredient". So we have not only defined all the data needs and functional needs around the ability to add recipes to a folder structure and the associated ingredients as requirements, but also, for example, the ability to create shared folders with friends or even the ability to enter which ingredients are already available at home.

Results and Conclusion (HM)

Our project aims to develop a digital application that will address the common problem faced by cooking enthusiasts: messy recipe resources and the need for a centralized platform to easily store and access recipes. To start the process, our team has determined its vision, mission, and target group. Before starting the project, market research was conducted to verify the relevance of the issue. It has been determined that there are existing applications that provide similar services regarding recipes. However, our project team aimed to create its concept by taking into account the shortcomings of existing applications. Our project aims to make cooking easier for people by designing and editing an app that brings together recipes from physical cookbooks, websites, social media platforms, and more. For example, while existing applications such as Cookbook and Kuri already offer similar services, our project highlights the importance of user-centered design with people, user stories, and storyboards developed based on collected data. Our ultimate goal is to create a user-friendly and efficient app for cooking enthusiasts that simplifies the recipe management process, providing a centralized platform to access and save recipes. While the act of cooking is not limited to certain demographic groups, we focused on individuals aged 18 to 35 as the primary target group and expanded our group to persons aged 16 to 50 as a secondary target group, provided they have an interest in cooking. Our entire target group includes all genders. Our project team conducted contextual research, including a qualitative survey and interviews, to gather information about the cooking and recipe behaviors of the target group. Through contextual inquiry, focus group, and market research, we've gathered valuable insights and data on cooking behavior, recipe use, and potential interest in this type of application. This data collected from surveys and interviews provided us with valuable information for the development of user characters, user stories, and storyboards, and the data collected was used to create people, user stories, and storyboards. Our team used a mixed-method approach to better understand the cooking behavior and recipe usage of its target users. To collect data from 37 participants, we conducted a quantitative survey covering various aspects such as cooking frequency, recipe sources, and interest in using a recipe compilation app. In addition, qualitative interviews were also conducted to gain deeper insights into participants' cooking processes, recipe collections, and motivations. The quantitative and qualitative data already collected through our survey and interview served as the optimal starting point for a prototype development process. However, it was thought that it would be helpful to go deeper using the focus group method to learn more about the wishes of potential application users. An online focus group of 6 people was formed to collect more data and identify possible requirements for implementation, and an online Zoom meeting was held with this focus group. Online tools such as the Conceptboard were used to facilitate interactive discussions among participants. Although existing applications such as Cook Book and Kuri offer similar services, our research aimed to develop our concept by combining improvements based on identified shortcomings in existing applications. The Focus Group was an important step for us in prototyping, as it partially changed our perspective on implementation. We made multiple assessments using the focus group Zoom meeting video and the Conceptboard. These group discussions gave us a better understanding of our potential users and their current cooking behaviour. This built the basis for further optimization of our personas.The data we collected regarding potential implementation, especially during the scenarios part, were evaluated in a table. In this table, we have clustered the relevant expressions as "Needs", "Wishes" and "Ideas". There is something that we consider important here. Creating an interface that you can follow where you can create shopping lists between the cookbook application and another application. These criteria will play an important role in our research for our next step. Based on the findings from the survey, qualitative interviews, and focus group, we created 4 different personas representing different types of users. Our goal in doing this is to get an overview of the requirements for our application and to develop scenarios that are valid and as close to reality as possible. It's about trying to figure out how to view software features through a user's eyes and understand who wants to do what and why. Based on the data collected, our team discovered that the use of recipes from the Internet was more common than physical cookbooks, and a significant percentage of respondents indicated that they were interested in using an app or website to compile their cookbooks. These findings showed that there is a potential demand for our new Cookbook app ideas. Summarize; As a result, our team embarked on an extensive journey to develop an application that could facilitate the cooking lives of individuals interested in the culinary arts. The in-depth research, market analysis, and user engagement provided a solid foundation for the development of user stories, storyboards, and ultimately app concepts. The project aimed to appeal to a wide range of cooking enthusiasts and provide a digital solution to effortlessly organize and access recipes from a variety of sources. We want to develop a digital application that can bring together recipes from different sources and that these recipes can be easily accessed anytime and anywhere, providing a convenient and organized platform to save them, meeting the needs of cooking enthusiasts. We aimed to provide a user-friendly and efficient application that simplifies the recipe method and provides a central platform to organize and access recipes from various sources.

Critical Assessment and reflection of methods (HH + help from group)

In the following section, our coockbook-project is critically examined up to the status of 14.07.2023 and the methods used are reflected. At the beginning it is to be stated that our topic made it very easy for us to develop own ideas and conceptions concerning our prototype. Everyone in our group could personally identify with the topic. A disadvantage of our choice of topic was the fact that we had to break away from our own ideas again and again in order to work neutrally and scientifically. In the beginning we worked in German. With our group expansion by Hakan Mural, English became our team language. This change was a challenge for some team members in the beginning.

In terms of content, it should be noted that our target group is very diverse. Between the ages of 18 and 35, some still live at home and others are married and may already have children of their own. We did not take these different life realities into account in our survey and only partially in our qualitative interviews. Later in our project, we excluded people with children, as this may be an influence on cooking behavior and recipe use. In our survey, we had not yet asked about this criterion, so it cannot be ruled out that responses from parents were included here. An advantage of the young age group and therefore also a reason for this choice, that here definitely the technical know how regarding the use of an app is secured and that we could acquire enough test persons in our environment for our research. The open and not very private topic additionally simplified the search for subjects and the start of the qualitative interviews and the focus group. Critically, some questions in our Questionnaire weren't clearly stated. For example the question: "Do you use cookbooks/websites (chefkoch etc.)?", some asked people answered this question with no, but did answer all the other questions regarding the use of recipes. It can be assumed that some people use recipes but have them from other sources. The question should have been asked differently, more like "Do you recipes at all?". Moreover the scales we used in the questionnaire weren't ideal due to the following problems. For some questions the scale from 1 to 10 could be smaller. This applies, for example, to the question "How often do you cook dishes from a recipe? For the question "How often do you cook during one week?" the scale from 1 to 7 seems appropriate, but it was kind of confusing for everyone who cooks more often than 7 times a week. We tried to solve this problem by marking 7 if you cook more often than seven times. That watered down our findings because we cannot now differentiate who cooks 7 or 14 times a week. In addition, we may not have offered all answer choices for some questions, and thus an important factor may have been forgotten. In addition, not all age groups are represented equally extensively.

The qualitative interviews were conducted in varying degrees of detail. Due to the small number of interviews, the entire target group is not represented, for example, in terms of age. The open interview guide gave us the opportunity to ask follow-up questions and to better respond to our subjects. In doing so, we were able to learn information about, for example, their life circumstances or their motivation to cook, which is not possible through quantitative methods. Some interview transcriptions show that the number of follow-up questions varied. Here, our procedure was not uniform. The evaluation was standardized and transparent. Rules for the evaluation were established in advance. However, we did not create a coding guide. We only determined the upper categories and defined them verbally for us. Through communicative validation, we tried to make the evaluation as objective as possible. Perfect objectivity is not possible with qualitative research methods.

The focus group allowed for a diversity of respondent profiles and enrichment of responses from the qualitative interviews. This was useful in confirming and adding to findings from the interviews. Due to the focus group's length of 1:45 hours, not all individuals were engaged in the debate by the end and fatigue was apparent. Consequence of this can be bias and missing information. Our focus group did not include our full target group. We managed to interview people of different ages, but due to the limitation in the number of participants, of course not every age could be studied and thus insights might have been lost. In addition, some subjects had a significantly lower average talk time. Due to the fact that all participants knew us in advance, there is a possibility that they reacted more enthusiastically to the idea and the topic than strangers probably would have done. In addition, the influence and bias of the presenters could not be completely prevented.

We compiled the personas from the information. We made sure to use people from the qualitative interviews as a basis and to enrich them with further information. The problem is that these were not fully recognized patterns or correlations. We randomly assigned some information. It cannot be excluded that prejudices and world views influenced this assignment. Despite elaborate research methods, the insights gained remain general and vague. The goal of developing personas is to be able to empathize with the target group. However, it should be noted that personas do not help us to define the target group. They are only a result of this. In addition, the data collected so far is not sufficient to be able to put ourselves completely emotionally into the target group.

We clustered the requirements that emerged from the focus group and discussed them together. Nevertheless, the division of the clustering is never completely objective. Our own ideas about the app were also incorporated here. As we displayed, our focus group and the emerged requirements of it, were not 100 % scientific and had some weaknesses. Nevertheless we tried to be as objective as possible knowing that our own opinions of the necessity of the needed requirements will influence our results. However we managed to define our user stories and divide them into two stages of importance. User stories are a good way to display tasks people would conduct with our app, but it sometimes feels redundant to maintain the order of “User, Function, Target” because some functions are just too basic and obvious to be described in such a detailed way. However it is an important step to think this way about appearing problems.

Workspace

This part should be empty for know.

Contextual Inquiry

- Standardized questionnaire to understand how people work/use recipes

- Interviews with up to three persons for more detailed information

- Focus group for design and creative ideas and translation into functions

Data Analysis

Questionnaire

- 32 answers; 1 invalid (status 04.05.2023)

' 2 Personas based on the questionaire'

Persona 1:

Age: 28

gender: female

Number of weekly cooking: 5 times a week

She use recipes physically never

She use recipes from the internet often to very often

She use recipes, when she is cooking for or with other people

If she like recipes, she is taking screenshots or pictures from them

she never missed a recipe

she really would like to use an App/ Website to create her own cookbook

Persona 2:

Age: 28

gender: male

Number of weekly cooking: 4 times a week

He use recipes physically very rarely

He use recipes from the internet rarly

He use recipes, when he is cooking for himself

If he like recipes, he is writing it down or copy them into a file

he missed a recipe before -> Why???

he really would like to use an App/ Website to create his own cookbook

Interviews

- Defining categories

1. Problems during the process / 2.

Next Steps

14.04.2023

1. User research -> self testing and questionnaire

2. Marketanalysis -> explore usage and environment of existing technology => "Cookbook App" / "Kptncook"

21.04.2023

1. Each group member organizes one person for a qualitative interview

2. Each group member contacts 10 people to fill out the questionnaire

1. conduct remaining qualitative interviews

2. Find more test persons for the qualitative questionnaire and encourage them to complete it (target: 30 completed questionnaires)

1. fill in missing information for the persona from the questionnaire (age, open questions)

2. Data analysis of the qualitative interviews

3. complement Personas with informations of the qualitative interview

1. define the goal of the focus group

2. Preparing the group disscussion for the Focusgroup (Step 1)

3. Preparing a Guideline for Step 1 (Questions and Informations we want to know)

Finalization of the concept for the focus group:

1. Introduction

2. Timelines for the Scenarios (Step 2)

3. Roles during the Focusgroup Interviews

4. Invitation

Talking about the Interviewees

Nice to have/Later needed

- Order all the ingredients directly through the app

- Converts a scanned text directly into the app

- Audio function for dirty fingers

- Remind yourself of different recepies

- Quantity Calculator

- Intolerances filter -> What do people like to eat / can't eat

- Searchengine for references

- Recipe suggestion

- Timing support for combining dishes

- Problem page, where people can add there day to day problems (or suggestions page)