Research and Questionnaire Analysis

Hayley and Emily

Summary of audience research

The purpose of our research was to gather as much information as possible regarding vegetarians and eating habits of a variety of people which can later help us when designing our recipe cards as we can personalise is slightly to fit the needs of the audience from the research we had previously carried out. We carried out face to face interviews which allowed us to get a better understanding of what people enjoyed eating and what they usually like to make themselves and it also meant that we could ensure that their answers gave us the information we needed unlike some other methods we had also tried. However when conducting these interviews we didn’t actually ask if they were vegetarian or not which is going to affect our research slightly as we are missing this important part of information for our project. Another method of getting our research was to make a survey and share this on ‘survey monkey’ which meant we could get anonymous answers on the questions we had planned out. This also meant that we could design the questions so we would get the answers that would benefit us most and would help us most overall. We shared the questionnaire on both of our social media websites and on our college blogs in order to share it as much as possible and get much more responses. We also decided to sign up to the vegetarian society and added a forum including our questionnaire, so it was available for more people to complete as we were lacking responses.

Question: How old are you?

• What does this tell you about your research and your audience? From looking at the age of the respondents we have found that the questionnaire has clearly appealed to

a younger audience as the main age here is between 11-20. The second most popular age range for our questionnaire was between 41-50 which does show that we have quite a wide range instead of limiting it to a specific group of people.

• How can you use this to make your product appeal to this audience? As we have clearly appealed to a younger audience, we could possibly use more colour and go for a more

modern theme for our recipe cards. This could also mean we may have to make it slightly more simplistic and easy to follow as younger people such as students may not want to spend as much time and also may prefer a cheaper, quicker recipe that can be easy to make and quick to eat.

Question: Gender?

• What does this tell you about your research and your audience? We can see that a female audience is prominent from this survey as we have obviously appealed to them

more. This could be telling us that this gender is most likely to purchase a recipe card, and would find it much more interesting. We have also found that the number of vegetarians between the two genders are equal which makes our results much easier to follow and means that we don’t have to make further changes when designing as we can now focus it on both genders.

• How can you use this to make your product appeal to this audience? This is going to be really useful when designing our recipe cards as it means that we should possibly design

it with a feminine theme and style to match with the response we received, however this could potentially limit our target audience as males may be put off by the design.

Question: Are you a vegetarian?

• What does this tell you about your research and your audience? The majority overall shows that our audience are not vegetarian, however a small percentage were, which shows

there is still some demand for vegetarian food. This also meant that we were able to see the type of foods vegetarians like to cook and eat, and with the combination of the other results it means we can get a mixed result and try cook something that both will enjoy with the use of vegetarian ingredients.

• How can you use this to make your product appeal to this audience? We will need to make sure that we use vegetarian products and don’t include any other unsuitable ingredients in

our recipe, ensuring that it fits the brief given to us. By combining a mix of ideas from both vegetarian and non vegetarian responses we can make a dish that is appealing to both. For example many people put a list of the foods they enjoy eating, by altering the recipes slightly we can ensure that it is appropriate for a vegetarian.

Question: Do you prefer main course or dessert?

• What does this tell you about your research and your audience? We had first planned to make a dessert based recipe card as this is something we felt would be seen as most

popular, however after looking at the responses we have found that the majority of answers were actually main course. This has caused us to think about the possibility of making a main course for the recipe card. On the other hand after looking at the responses we gathered from interviews, we got a lot of people saying they like desserts and also giving us ideas of their favourites.

• How can you use this to make your product appeal to this audience? We will need to base our recipe from our results of the research . So we will need to either continue with the idea

of having a dessert product as we gathered a lot of information about peoples favourites desserts from the interviews but we got a more popular reply for main courses in our questionnaire. This means we would need to create a main course or dessert that would really appeal to the audience.

Question: What kind of recipe’s do you like?

• What does this tell you about your research and your audience? We got a mixed result when we asked this question with quite a majority of people liking main course dishes but

quite a few also preferred dessert dishes (for example, ice cream and chocolate fudge cake). Quite a few responses weren’t specific enough as to what recipes they enjoy (for example, junk food) and this doesn’t help us narrow down the exact recipe to make.

• How can you use this to make your product appeal to this audience? As we got a very mixed result with this question, we feel it is best to take in to account all of the ideas and possibly

combine or come up with a compromise of a few of the ideas that fit in with the vegetarian style and theme. This question is going to really help us as it doesn’t limit the choices of food we could make , however it does give us a few ideas of possible recipes that we could change to suit the vegetarian brief.

Question: What theme of food do you prefer?

• What does this tell you about your research and your audience? We got a wide range of different results from this question with 2 also skipping this question. This means that we

don’t have one particular one to focus on and which ever theme of food we go for, it will work for everyone. Italian is a theme of food that has taken more votes than the rest but not by much so we could maybe base our recipe on this theme.

• How can you use this to make your product appeal to this audience? We could make quite easy and fun recipes using the theme of Italian foods. The majority of the respondents

suggested quite a few Italian dishes such as pasta and lasagne and these could be quite basic but delicious recipes to try. We have a wide range of vegetables and sauces to use instead of meat for the pasta or within the lasagne and this makes it suitable for vegetarians as well as pleasing people who aren’t vegetarian.

Question: What season of food do you prefer?

• What does this tell you about your research and your audience? Even though we have been looking at recipes like lasagne or pasta as a main course, the majority of respondents

would prefer light snacks compared to winter meals but only a little. This could mean creating a more lighter and summery dish that is also Italian based and this then satisfies the audience. But as it’s only a small amount extra who prefer light snacks, it doesn't mean we have to rule out doing lasagne or pasta based dishes.

• How can you use this to make your product appeal to this audience? This would mean focusing our main idea around a light, summer snack and this could be creating a dessert and

using our original ideas instead of creating a main course. But we also could consider doing a main course as people also preferred winter meals. It would be more ideal to use the idea of a main course that is quite light so that it appeals to the audience who have chosen these options and still keeping it vegetarian.

Question: Do you have any dietary requirements?

• What does this tell you about your research and your audience? The majority of respondents don’t have any dietary requirements with a few exceptions from a few respondents. For example

one person said they are allergic to fish but because the recipes we are creating, we need to eliminate any trace of meat in them. Some people don’t eat any dairy or meat either or gluten. One of the responses as well said they like to sometimes keep vegan.

• How can you use this to make your product appeal to this audience? We would need to keep this in mind when we create our products and whether to make our product vegetarian and vegan or

to just keep it vegetarian as the majority of the audience don’t have any specific dietary needs. We feel that limiting ourselves further by restricting certain ingredients due to possible allergies will result in the recipe being very bland or something that doesn’t fit in with the ideas the responses gave us. So due to this we are going to choose the recipe that is only suitable for vegetarians or vegans as a lot of people that responded didn’t actually have any dietary requirements at all.

Question: What is your favourite colour?

• What does this tell you about your research and your audience? We got a more popular colour which was red from the majority of respondents. We also got some extra comments

of orange and pink but the main colour that has gained the most votes is red. This is a colour that would mainly attract a more female audience but if we use quite a range of reds it could also attract a male audience as well and we have to make sure we are still appealing to a male audience.

• How can you use this to make your product appeal to this audience? I think that because we have quite a few respondents who have answered the question with blue, we could use

both red and blue throughout the cards as these are commonly perceived as being for both male and female. We are also aiming our cards at a younger audience and using quite bright and vibrant colours would help attract that younger audience as quite dull and toned down reds and blues it wouldn’t stand out to a younger audience and would attract a more older audience.

Question: What would entice you to buy a recipe card?

• What does this tell you about your research and your audience? There is a close result between design and images for this question, this shows that the look of the recipe card is going to

be essential as this is the thing that clearly appeals to most people, rather than the actual food. It shows that the visual element of this project is essential and this is something that we will have to focus on when designing our own recipe cards.

• How can you use this to make your product appeal to this audience? This means that we need to focus on the design of the cards and to create quite a bright and bold design that would stand

out when looking through some recipe cards and we also need to make sure it’s bright so that it attracts a younger audience and looks quite fun so it doesn’t turn away the younger audience. We need to make sure that our images look appetising so that the audience see what the end result could look like. If it didn't look appetising in the image, it isn’t going to make the audience want to give it a go. It could also be useful to use step to step images so that the audience can visually see the steps to accomplish the recipe.

Further analysis

Looking at our results, we have found that a younger audience has filled out the survey rather than an older generation. This can really help us when later designing our recipe cards as we will be able to design it in a way that best suits this age range, which can be easier for us as we are of the same age, and are able to relate. Another result that has stood out is that a lot more females responded to our survey, however when later looking at how many males/females were vegetarians, we found that this number was equal. This result had first caused us to think that we may have to aim our recipe cards at mainly females, however this changed when we found that the amount of male vegetarians was in fact equal to females. When questions regarding design were asked many people had fairly mixed opinions on their favourite colours and what most appealed to them. But overall the main things to stand out were red and image and design were equal. This caused us to think about the kind of design we wanted to choose and also told us that the design was essential when designing the recipe cards as this is something that people first see and this is what appeals them to buying the cards. We were also planning on doing a dessert for our recipe cards but the majority of the respondents preferred main courses to a dessert and this makes us rethink on what to base our recipe cards on. We also realised that people preferred summer snacks to big winter meals which will make the recipes we chose to do less complex with less ingredients and this makes it easier to fit in with the most prominent age range (11-20) as this age range will want quick and simple recipes.

Conclusions

These first set of results were done when we only received 23 responses. We looked through our results and realised we needed a stronger set of responses to get a wider range of answers. We then sent the link out more to individual people and people then passed it on from there and we ended up with around 90 responses. We looked through the results and there were a few minor changes to the overall results. We still had more females than males who took the survey and before the amount of vegetarians were equal, after it became clear that females were slightly ahead. But for the last question we had images and design that were equal but after we saw that images was a more popular result. The age range was still the same with 11-20 year olds answering the survey the most but we got a wider range of ages answering the survey compared to before. We had red being the colour that was the most popular answer and after we found that blue became the most popular result so this caused us to think about possible design changes and colour scheme changes to be made. We also realised that summer snacks had been taken over by winter meals by 1 person and this is also a close result which we need to think about, as we first intended to create meals based on summer snacks. Italian was the most popular theme of food before and after the survey which is ideal as we wanted to base our recipes on the theme of Italian foods at the start. We did want to do our recipes based purely on desserts but we saw in the survey that both before and after, main courses were ahead of desserts and this is causing us to think more about what we will do because we had based our interview questions on desserts.

Conclusions

From looking at the results from the respondents we have found that there was a clear lead in the ages of people that were answering our survey as more 11-20 year olds were replying. We have also found that we had a lot more female respondents aged 11-20 that were answering the survey, which has caused us to think about possibly aiming our design at females and going along a more feminine approach. As we are now thinking about aiming our recipe cards at this age range it has allowed us to design slightly bolder and brighter designs that can grab the attention of the audience. This would be very different from if we were to design a recipe card for an older audience as we would then have to think about using more muted colours and designs. When the question regarding colour was asked in our survey, we have found that red is popular with the age range of 11-20, which could mean we should think about using this as one of the main colours for our design. We has first intended to create recipe cards based on desserts, after looking at the survey responses this has been confirmed as something we want to do as vegetarians that took the survey chose desserts as their preferred choice rather than main meals. There was also more 11-20 year olds that we found to be vegetarians which has helped us to decide which age range we want to be aiming the recipe cards at as we have found a much bigger vegetarian audience in this age range. We found that vegetarians preferred the colour red to blue which also relates to our age range. They preferred summer snacks to winter meals which was our initial idea in the first place but we found that they liked traditional English to Italian which makes us rethink our decision.