Brief
Our problem statement read as follows:
"Busy parents struggle to plan and prepare healthy meals for their families. As a solution, we are designing an app that has both meal prep and meal planning features, focused on suggesting meal plans based on dietary preferences, nutritional needs, and available ingredients, along with step-by-step cooking instructions and a grocery list generator."
UX Research
The goal of this research was to better understand the meal planning/prep industry and the potential users (their behaviors, needs, and pain points) when planning and preparing meals.
We hoped to answer the following questions through our user research:
Other than parents, who else struggles with meal planning and prep?
What are their biggest challenges in planning and prepping meals?
What is more of a challenge, time or money?
Are dietary restrictions and food preferences points of concern?
If people don’t use a meal planning/prep service, do they have any preferences or methods for planning/prepping meals?
Our research methodology involves 3 steps and aims to better understand the industry and our potential users.
Primary research: We conducted this research to understand the current industry and typical users of meal planning and meal prep apps. This information helped define our research objectives and methodology.
Competitive Analysis: Review existing meal planning/prep apps and services and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.
User Survey: A 12-question online survey to gather quantitative data.
I was responsible for the competitive analysis. We decided to focus on two industries that co-inhabit the meal planning space - the meal prep and meal planning/recipe software industries. The following is a comprehensive market analysis of the main players in both of these spaces - revenue, user base, key features, user feedback and SWOT analysis - followed by website traffic data and SEO results for each.
HelloFresh (meal prep)
Blue Apron(meal prep)
Mealime (meal planning)
Paprika (meal planning)
We gathered market data and did a thorough UI/UX audit of the above competitors.
MVP
After completing our research, we came up with the objectives for our MVP.
Enable users to create a profile that captures dietary preferences, nutritional goals, family size, and meal preferences.
Provide customizable meal plans based on inputs, with an option to adjust or swap meals.
Allow users to add recipes to a calendar and select which meal the recipe is for (breakfast, lunch, dinner). This calendar feature serves as the homescreen.
Generate a grocery list based on selected meals, allowing users to add or remove items and mark them as taken care of.
Allow users to switch to a Pro Plan to access more advanced recipes and additional features.
Provide users with step-by-step instructions and ingredients list to make their selected recipe.
We generated user stories for each scenario and did a feature analysis using the RICE Framework to determine the impact. Once we were satisfied with the results, we proceeded to building out the information architecture and site map, which can be viewed here.
User Flows and Wireframes
I was responsible for creating the grocery list user flow, which documented how a user might use the grocery list tab to add items they needed to restock. The userflow can be seen below.
From there, we constructed the low-fidelity wireframes. I took the above user flow for guidance and created the following wireframes.
Prototype
Our final prototype can be viewed here: Prototype