Project Overview

A mobile app that helps people meal plan effectively by shopping ingredients around the specific recipe. People can quickly search for new recipes and cook them based on ingredients, directions, and nutrition information. They can add the specific recipe and create their own as well.

Project Info

Duration

My Role

Team

Summer 2022 internship design challenge

A week

UX designer

Solo project

Final Design & Key Features recap

Quickly discover new recipes by diverse categories

Quick search bar to search specific recipes and explore new recipes with diverse categories
Click to view the recipe's described information
Add ingredients to the shopping list directly from the recipe you want to try

Effectively meal plan with recipes you liked or you created

You can meal plan with recipes you liked or created.
Intuitive options of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack.

Create your own recipes effectively and manage them easily

Add title, picture, ingredients to create your own recipe
You can manage your recipes in the profile menu. You can delete or share the recipe.

RESEARCH

Initial Thoughts 💭 & Understanding the problem

When I read the design prompt, I immediately thought, "This is a topic I need to be serious about since I can be their potential user!" I'm living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a home for many students at the University of Michigan. Most students here, including me, are busy going to school, doing their assignments or research, having a bunch of team meetings, and coming back home. There is apparently no time to sit down and schedule my meals. As a result, we college students lack the scheduled meals with balancing well among various nutritions. I felt this design challenge could apply to most of my colleagues, me, and most of the people who are living face modern life. In addition, this has a lot of opportunities as a solution of creating a centralized mobile app with features of meal plan helping with buying ingredients.

"Design a mobile application that makes it easy to plan meals by shopping for ingredients around specific recipes. It should be easy for users to discover new recipes or create their own."

I broke down the design prompts to scope the problem and help me moving forward to conduct the research.

Mobile app for meal planning
Shopping feature for ingredients around specific recipes
Search and view new recipes easily
Create recipes and manage them
Target user group? -> people who care what they eat and like to explore new recipes and cook them.

User Interviews

To better understand the users and user needs, I conducted 5 user interviews. I recruited college students who frequently cook by themselves or have planned their meal plans.

Goals

Identify the specific behavior of searching new recipes
Discover the process of purchasing ingredients based on the specific recipe
Directions to plan a meal plan and their pain points

Overarching Questions

How do people discover or create the recipes?
How do people shop for the ingredients?
How do people meal plan, and what are their needs to plan meals successfully?

View Full Interview Protocol →

Affinity Wall

I chose to make the Affinity Wall to synthesize the answers from user interviews I conducted. The Affinity Wall led me to find the similarities and patterns among different interviewees. As a result, I could take significant key takeaways that led me to make personas to represent the target users' needs and pain points.

Key Findings & Insight

Prefer online search for new recipes

Users tend to prefer to search online for new recipes rather than buy cookbooks or getting a recommendation from friends.

Tend to create new personal recipes

Users feel comfortable making the same or similar recipe they made before by changing or adding ingredients.

Prefer to make a list of ingredients

Most users make a list of ingredients before they purchase them. The list can be based on the specific recipe.

Meal planning is time-consuming

Some users feel meal plan is necessary for them, but it's difficult for them to meal plan regularly because of their busy schedule.

ANALYSIS

Persona

I created persona to reflect key findings and insights from interviews and the Affinity wall. The persona represents the product's target user group and help me move forward in designing the storyboard and user scenarios.

Competitive Analysis

I analyzed 4 popular apps surrounding this meal planning/recipes domain. I was quite surprised that almost none of them balanced well the key features I'm designing, such as searching recipes, meal planning, creating recipes, and listing the ingredients by the specific recipe.

Opportunities & Design Objectives

ONE

Easy searching & personalized recipe recommendation

TWO

Intuitive and easy recipe creation function

THREE

The steps of meal planning should be streamlined and personalized.

The search function should be located at the top of the main page and stand out.

It should be easy to create their own recipes and provides an easy way to manage them.

The meal planning function should be intuitive and similar to writing a diary, so people can often open and write.

DESIGN

Information Architecture

I created Information Architecture to lay out all of the needed pages, page items, and user actions at the glance. By making the IA, I was able to focus on the organization of the information within the app and move forward to make a low-fi prototype.

Low-fidelity Prototype

User Testing & Iteration

I ran user testing with 3 participants with college students at my university with who I could connect fast. I ran the tasks and observed the behavior of the participants navigating the screens and designs.

1. Add a counter UI to control serving

Based on user feedback, it seemed like users wanted to see the exact amount of ingredients based on different servings.
I enabled the user to change the amount of serving a the number counter UI. Users can immediately know the exact amount of ingredients that fit the number of people.

2. Enable a meal plan from the pre-made recipes

Upon feedback from the user, it seemed like allowing users to add meal plans only by creating a recipe could be burdensome and not intuitive since they are navigating two menus. I enabled users can also add meal plans with recipes from My Recipes and Likes.

Interaction Prototype In Figma

REFLECTION

💡 Balancing the features
I had ideas of diverse features to add, but I had to avoid putting too many features and flows for completing my original goal. Building UX on the meal plan feature was difficult since there were many things to consider such as a date, recipe, meal time, etc.
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💡 Time constraints
As I tried to finish the project within one week, time constraint was a challenge. However, I had a lot of fun conducting this design exercise and learned a few new things, especially around the topic of recipe/meal plans.