B Y

L U C Y H A RW O O D , M H A R I T Y L E R , S I M R A N G I L L A N D C A M E L I A A S S A D I A N

The Situation we are addressing

Who: Parents and ChildrenWhat: Families not eating healthilyWhen: Breakfast, Lunch and DinnerWhere: At homeWhy: families eating unhealthy food because they

think it is easier and faster, children need simple fun ways of eating healthier

The Problem

Many parents are very busy because they work a lot or are single-parents, so they don’t feed their

families healthily because they don’t have time or ideas about how to do it.

Our Question

How can you make it more convenient to feed your family healthier food?

Key insight Statements

You need to feed your children quickly before you go to work, you need a quick recipe that you can get easily off your phone.

Some children find it very difficult to eat fruit and vegetables. If their parents had lots of exciting ways to make them look and taste more appealing then it would be a lot easier.

Many families are eating unhealthily because they don’t know where their food comes from or how to make healthy food into something enjoyable.

Elevator Pitch

Our team, The Midnight Puffins, is developing a recipe and information mobile app to help parents with picky eaters in their family who struggle with getting their children interested

in food or to eat healthily. This will be achieved by providing recipes with fun twists, appealing to children and easy/quick for families to make.

This will encourage families to eat healthy foods from a young age.

User Profiles

Competitors or alternative solutions that already exist in the market

There are lots of recipe and food apps that already exist in the market such as: BBC good food, Pepper Plate and Yummly Recipes

And people could get recipes on the internet (e.g. using the BBC website)

However our app does not require internet, is easy to access, a lot more creative and focuses more on giving a balanced diet to the whole family in an enjoyable, rewarding and simple way.

MVP user stories and feature chosen

As a busy parent, I don’t want to spend too much time on cooking, so that I can spend more time with my family.

As a child, I want to learn how to cook different things, so that I can be healthy when I grow up.

As a parent with picky eaters for children, I want to be able to make healthy food into something they will want to eat.

Overall, our apps core feature will be that it provides recipes that are quick, easy to access, healthy and creative.

Flow of app & user feedback integrated

We decided to have a kid’s and Adult’s area because we spoke to different parents and children and thought it would be more appealing to them if we separated the different activities into age appropriate sections so it would suit their needs.

We included the diary, star chart and games because some people thought our app was too simple and needed something to make it different from other recipe apps as well as making it a more rewarding process.

Key Wireframe 1

Home screen Adults or children’s area Help Area

Key Wireframe 2

Children’s area home

Choosing a recipe

Changing the mascot (costumes)

Star chart

Key Wireframe 3

adult’s area home

Family food Diary

Progress Chart

Example of recipe screen

Feasibility

There is not that much data we would need to collect for the making of our app. We would just have to make up lots of imaginative and creative recipes which is very easy to do

We realise that with our app there is quite a lot of content (with games, star/ progress charts etc.), but what we want to do is start with just a basic recipe app and slowly add to it, making it more appealing to our wide range of users.

Technically our app seems hard to make as it has so many features, however we have already tried making some of it in Balsamiq and App Inventor and have been very successful, so we know that it is realistically possible.

Business Case & Customer pledges

We were hoping to choose business model three, where our app is sponsored by either a celebrity chef or a health care service, because most of our customers are busy parents or children who don’t really want to pay for an app – but it is extremely hard to find people willing to sponsor our app.

So, if that is unsuccessful, we thought we could use business model two, where the main app is free but some users can pay for extra recipes and games for the children – there were a lot more customer pledges for this because it means that people can get the free app, decide if they like it, then pay for extra if they want to.

Marketing Strategy

How will we retain our users? We will update new recipes and add-ons from time to time for our app. Also, as our app develops we will incorporate games in it so children can unlock them if they stick to the healthy food plan for a certain amount of time.

How will we gain our first 1000 users? We were planning to get sponsors e.g. celebrity chefs to help sponsor and advertise our app. We think this would be a great idea as this would encourage younger people to cook because if they see a famous chef taking part in the app, this would not only commercialise our app but get younger children inspired.

Advertising our app: We will advertise our app by making a dedicated Facebook page and a twitter account. We will use quite mainstream social apps as many people use them and it would get the word out about our app, as well as not costing anything.

Wildcard (anything else)

We did contact several celebrity chefs (via email) to tell them about our app and to see if they wanted to help

We also made a Facebook page and a twitter account to help advertisement for our app www.facebook.com/AppCookit

The twitter account we made is called @cookitapp_