Link to Nourish App (Note: The app is currently optimised for mobile, so if accessing through a desktop you'll want to switch to mobile view in the developer tools 😊)
Welcome to Nourish! The Nourish App educates and provides recipes around in season produce, allowing a user to create an account and create shopping list and save favourite recipes as well.
Our Final group project as a team of five. The School Of Code set us a task to create anything we can solve a problem to, so we wanted to create something meaningful. It became apparent that something we all cared about was leading a more sustainable life, and with this eating more sustainably.
Imports of food have a high carbon footprint so we decided to make an app that helps to educate people about food that is in season right now, along with recipe inspiration for those particular ingredients.
During the early development process, we created multiple User Personas to represent the different types of people who might use our product and from there, we created user stories.
For example, meet Jaya; a young professional working in Notting Hill. She likes to cook using fresh ingredients and has been feeling uninspired recently due to a lack of options. Occasionally, she hosts dinner parties for friends and will make an effort to pick ingredients that are fresher. She has recently become more health-conscious and would like to eat more organic food if possible as she is becoming increasingly aware of the harmful effects of the pesticides that are used on out-of-season produce imported from countries with less-stringent regulations. She would now like to focus on making more dishes using seasonal produce but is having trouble finding these recipes at her fingertips.
Based on this user persona, we refined our ideas by using the Disney Ideation model. We jotted down our ideas on our Miro board and decided on the core features we would like to include in our MVP. Following this process, we sent out surveys to the wider School of Code community to receive feedback on what features they would use in a seasonal food app. The results highlighted that the most popular feature was the ability to save recipes to your favourites.
To quickly learn the scale of our product, we created lo and hi-fidelity prototypes
using Figma.
We adopted an iterative approach - based on feedback as well as usability
issues we encountered, we came back to these designs to make appropriate
adjustments as the project developed.
Once our low and high fidelity prototypes were completed, we went through the design and organised the elements into a hierarchy of components and sub-components. This allowed us to easily spot reusable components, along with their variations (state, props, behaviour) and gave the team a good sense of the scope of work ahead. This aided our workflow as any team member could jump in, pick an isolated component from the backlog and code it.
We initially thought about exploring new technologies however we agreed on using the PERN stack so that we could consolidate our knowledge and add more value to the app in a short amount of time.
We used jest, super test, and cypress to test our app applying some tests primarily around the key components, and lastly end-to-end tests to consolidate the user journey.
Git, Heroku and Netlify had a crucial role in our CI and CD.
We began each day with a team standup in which we recap the previous day. We kept feedback cycles short by meeting before breaks to update the whole team. We would end the day with a retrospective in which we would reflect on the day. We used a series of sprints to achieve the MVP This was through the use of a Trello board as it broke down tasks that needed to be done.
- Filter by dietary requirements when searching for recipes eg, vegetarian, vegan, gluten free.
- Ability to customise saved recipes - swap out ingredients they don’t like or altered ingredient amounts.
- User profile that includes a dashboard of their details, favourite recipe, saved dietary requirement, location and shopping list.
- Map function so they can search for local market shops in the nearby area to but local produce.