#1: Defining Requirements

The first few days of the first sprint before the Hackathon were used for defining requirements for Gastronome. We quickly kickstarted the process of brainstorming— user stories were written, features were defined and roles were allocated to individual team members.

We started off the process by brainstorming for ideas that matched the theme of Healthy Living and settled on a simple meal planning application named Gastronome. The application aims to encourage more people to lead healthier lives starting from changing their diets.

Gastronome focuses on recommending recipes and predicting weight changes for young to working adults who want to start eating healthily. Unlike other recipe or meal planning applications, our application also provides analytics for users to always keep and stay on track to their diet or calorie count. We also decided to track their BMI and weight changes in the application to provide greater insights for our users.

Our original goal was to create an android application, which gradually expanded it to fit the expectations of people who would want to use their desktop to view recipes (bigger screens = websites!).

creating user stories!

our technical solution!

During the creation of the inception deck, my group decided to lay out some roles so that we have a better idea of what we all need to do throughout the project. Considering how my expertise laid in design and web development, I took up the role of the UI/UX designer and web developer of the team. My role consisted of developing UI mockups and prototypes that clearly illustrate how the application and site function and look like, as well as creating functional and appealing features that address our client’s needs.

As such, I began working on developing some prototypes from several user stories that we gathered. These prototypes and how the designs came to be will be elaborated in the next post!

Wan Ning