Charcuterie Coach

Timeline

• December 2022 (3 weeks)

PROBLEM

People are not succeeding with this newly found hobby/business.

Knowing many people who have recently gotten interested in charcuterie, the mention of a community or forum would help them to continue to pursue this whether it be a hobby or a business idea. Those same people said that having some sort of teacher would have been very helpful.

SOLUTION

Give newcomers exactly what they need!

The goal of this app is to give people new to this art guidance and feedback,

GOALS

What should this app achieve?

RESEARCH

The important questions to ask.

5 friends and acquaintances of mine were asked these 5 questions in terms of learning a new hobby/activity. (1 being the most negative and 5 being the most positive).

1. Do you find it is easier to learn something new with guidance?

2. How important is peer feedback to you?

3. In terms of creativity, do you like to freestyle or have something to follow?

4. Do you prefer to be included in a community of like-minded enthusiasts?

5. Is independence important to you when learning?

The outcome of these questions further lead me to believe that an app like this was something needed and something that would be helpful for newer enthusiasts.

COMPETETIVE ANALYSIS

Who exactly is our competition?

As far as my research has showed me, there is no direct competition as far as companies or apps are concerned. The closest thing to competition would be social media “gurus” showing the public how it is done, but there is no interactivity in that.

DESIGN PROCESS

What worked and what did not?

The design process followed a simple flow of research, plan, wireframe then prototype.

I got a decent amount of feedback from peers and my instructor about my wireframes, here is what changed.

In this first example, I thought that it was good design progress that after hearing my initial homepage wireframe looked very plain, that I went out of my way to resize some pictures that I had taken personally to make it look more like a collage. I felt this helped the homepage a lot by giving it a “mix and match” feel, similar to that of a charcuterie board where all items are different sizes.

In the second example here, I originally wanted a scrolling feel similar to social media on an iPhone. I was reminded by my instructor that it was an iPad app and I should account for a bigger screen as one large picture would be very overpowering on an iPad screen. In my final prototype I developed more of an image gallery style with various pages which I thought was much more suited for a larger screen.

Style Guide

What I would do differently next time…

1. With this being one of my first projects and having limited time to complete the task, I feel like I could have drawn more inspiration from other modern apps instead of relying purely on my creativity

2. Focus more on “The Gallery” section. You can only read and absorb so much base information before feedback is needed. If I could continue to work on this project, I would try to turn “The Gallery” into a mini social media space.

3. If given the time, I would have talked to more people who are specifically interested in charcuterie and make some research questions targeted to that specific audience.