MerryKitchen

Services:

Industry:

Duration:

Team size:

UI/UX DESIGN, MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT, WEB DEVELOPMENT

SOCIAL

9 MONTHS

6 PEOPLE

Technology stack

IOS:

MVVM / iOS SDK (Foundation, UIKit, IB, Push Notifications) / Alamofire, RealmSwift / IGListKit / R.swift, Crashlytics / Firebase Analytics

Android:

MVVM / DataBinding / Room / Retrofit /

Moshi / Picaso / Cicerone / Firebase /

Crashlytics

Web Admin:

JavaScript / SCSS

Backend:

MVC / Symfony / MySQL / Amazon SES / Amazon S3

Elegant app for amateurs and professionals to exchange recipes and share cooking tips. The app allows you to view a range of step-by-step recipes and exchange them with the public. All users have an opportunity to like, comment, add recipes to favorites, and subscribe to chosen authors.

About the client

As a company, MerryKitchen has two areas of interest. They create recipes and distribute them on popular social networks or video hosting sites, as well as engage in the production and sale of natural food products.

Business challenge

MerryKitchen wanted to create a unique mobile & web app for users from all over the world, where users could learn how to cook from scratch, improve their skills, share their cooking tips all from within a user-friendly and Instagram-like experience.

Delivered solution

The project included a considerable number of components that needed to be combined properly to build the architecture of the digital product.

Our team implemented various solutions during the development process that led the project to excellent results.

UX and UI prototyping and approval stage

Regarding the project's business model and customer's requirements, the target audience of the app should have included users of all ages.

Our designers had a task to create a prototype for a graphic interface that would facilitate the user experience.

In combination with the colors of the client's brand book, including successful solutions for navigation and placement of UI components, we created a universal but, at the same time, unique UI design that satisfied the client's and the users’ needs.

Media files storage

The source database of recipes was rather large. We needed to come up with a solution that allowed users to store a vast number of media files and expand favorites based on the recipes added to the database. We have previously managed Amazon's capabilities for other projects with similar tasks, and following the experience, we chose S3 data storage. Before storing the recipe images, the server's organic algorithm would create several versions of the uploaded images in different resolutions for different sections of the app. This way, we set a specific file size threshold. The server transmitted high-quality images to the client applications while saving user traffic and improving performance.

User content

User-generated content always raises issues concerning the validity and accessibility of added data for users. We decided to include a two-step analysis of the new recipes’ input text, locally and on the server. The app and server contain a considerable list of “stop” words that are used for the review. As a second verification step, we integrated a moderation system handled by a specialist through the web system of the administrator. We implemented this system to protect users from potentially dangerous products. Additionally, we applied a notification system based on Google Firebase tools so that users were always up-to-date and informed about the status of their recipes.

App navigation

Since the navigation model used the tab bar component at the bottom of the screen, it was necessary to build an architecture that allowed us to save the screens' sections and switch between them in one touch. We decided to use open-source Cicerone, getting rid of the problem of having to log in to previously opened sections, and then search for those screens that were already in an active session.

Project results

Working on the MerryKitchen project was compelling and thought-provoking. It helped us widen our expertise with Instagram-like social service. The results we achieved with this product make us confident that the app will be successful and competitive on the market. The MerryKitchen app has been released, and our team is continually working on new features and ideas for it.