VeggieHaven

5 min readAug 9, 2020

OVERVIEW

VeggieHaven is a solution aimed at providing vegetarian cooking recipes to vegetarians. Some vegetarian meals exclude animal processed meals like meat, fish, chicken, turkey and dairy products. Vegetarian diets vary from Lacto related meals to ovo-vegetarian and purely vegan meals. With the recipes provided by VeggieHaven, nutritious meals are provided for numerous age groups. Most people believe that vegetarian meals are strictly meals without meat, poultry or fish but it is a lot more than that. Here are some of the vegetarian categories:

Lacto-vegetarian: this meal type excludes meat, fish, poultry and eggs. Dairy products like milk, cheese and yoghurt are the only animal processed meal included in the Lacto-vegetarian diet
Ovo-vegetarian: this vegetarian meal option includes eggs.
Lacto-ovo-vegetarian: this is a blessed combination of eggs and dairy products are permitted within this diet plan.
Pescatarian: A pescatarian meal entails fish related meals.
Vegan: A strict vegan consumes mostly vegetables and starch meals. This excludes all animal products.

Other vegans follow a semi-vegetarian meal plan:

Pollotarian: Within this diet plan includes only poultry-related meals. Pollotarians do not consume red meat and seafood.
Flexitarian: this is the periodical consumption of animal produce. Most vegans do not categorise this as a vegetarian diet.

PROBLEM

Some vegetarians have grown in the lifestyle with vegetarian diet plans of their choice and some vegetarians have transitioned to this lifestyle for health reasons or by personal choice. Now some of these people do not have access to vegetarian recipes for their cultural dishes. This case study is aimed at providing an online repository of cooking recipes for different types of vegetarians from different cultural backgrounds.

RESEARCH PROCESS

A vegetarian diet is said to contain a mix of vegetables, healthy fats, protein and grains. Yes! There are protein-rich plant foods, meals like tofu, nuts, seeds, legumes and lots more. There are different traditional dishes within numerous countries where meat and fish are always included for example, within Nigeria we have Vegetable soup which is called Afang by the Calabar or Efo riro by the Yorubas. This soup includes all the orishirishi like dried fish, chicken, meat and lots more. Looking at this meal, some vegetarians have no idea on how to make such soup without all those extras.

ROLES

Within this case study, I played the role of the Researcher, User Interface Designer and User Experience Designer.

User Interviews and User Personas

With VeggieHaven, vegetarian recipes for meals like Vegetable soup are provided vegetarians by vegetarians. To come to this solution, I have interviewed some people and here are their profiles:

Samson Oke

Age: 24 years old

Personality: Introvert

Food Lifestyle: Lacto-Vegetarian and sometimes a Strict Vegetarian

Were you originally a vegetarian? I grew up in a vegan household

How do you cook your meals? I just cook my meals with mushrooms, tofu and sometimes beancurd. I cook with no fish and meat.

Would you like to have access to some vegetarian cooking recipes? When I get a comfortable home, yes.

Uchenna Duru

Age: 30 years

Personality: Playful

Food Lifestyle: Lacto-Vegetarian

Were you originally a vegetarian? No, I transitioned

How do you cook your meals? I try to make it work.

Would you like to have access to some vegetarian cooking recipes? Sure, I’d like to.

WIREFRAMES

Within this stage, I had to sketch some ideas for VeggieHaven and I was able to come up with different sections.

The menu section which has the available recipes based on Nationality and the type of Vegetarian lifestyle selected.

The next section displays the hero image and the search bar which users can search for recipes for different dishes.

Next, we have a section which displays subsections of vegetarian types.

Moving on, we have an auto-generated section which displays the most searched cooking recipes within the platform. This is aimed at helping users view some cooking recipes people use in their different homes.

The Contact Us sect gives users the chance to reach out to Veggiehaven with questions or recommendations they would like to share.

And in the end, we have the footer.

COLORS

I decided to use colors that speak more with a vegetarian lifestyle. Green with its different shades for the high-fidelity prototypes and I used different shades of grey for the wireframes.