Mealit 🥙
Planning meals, buying groceries, and finding the time to cook are difficult for students.
This app aims to help students plan their weekly meals in advance by building a community that encourages the habit of cooking.
🗓️ Timeline
August 15 - December 2, 2023
👩🏻💻 Role
UX Research, UI Design, Usability Testing
✒️ Tools
Figma, FigJam, Miro, Adobe Illustrator
IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM
Considering students' academic schedules, job workloads, and numerous other commitments, they often struggle with the challenge of maintaining a healthy diet while juggling between work.
The task of planning meals, buying groceries, and finding the time to cook is difficult. In such circumstances, students often resort to unhealthy options like ordering takeout, ultimately compromising their physical and mental well-being.
College students eat fast food 70% more often than non–college-attending adults ‼️
DISCOVERING USER NEEDS
The survey, receiving 21 responses, focused on understanding the meal planning habits of potential users, asking questions such as how frequently they plan meals and go grocery shopping, the factors influencing their meal planning process, and the features they would prefer within a meal planning app, etc.
User Survey ✍🏻
I also conducted interviews with 3 college students, allowing me to directly interact with and listen to users. The questions here were focused on gaining insights into the participants’ weekly meal planning process in detail, including a few questions about their eating habits—how frequently they order in or dine out, their previous experience with meal planning apps (if any), and why or why not they would use one.
User Interview 💬
“What are the top 3 features that you’d like to have in a meal-planning app?”
81% of participants have not used any app to plan their meals before.
64.7% of participants plan their meals 3 or more times in a week.
“I just want to be able to track my groceries and plan my meals around that.”
“I’d love a fun app, teaching me new meal prep ideas and maybe a way to keep me motivated and actually enjoy the process!”
COMPARING THE MARKET
Even though many students struggle with maintaining healthy eating habits; most of them do not turn to the meal-planning apps currently available in the market. WHY?
Compare the available features and the overall experience of planning meals on the existing apps.
Goal 🎯
All these apps look the same. The layouts, content, and the way people use them are very similar.
They fail to provide students with the fun factor and constant motivation to keep going 💪🏻
View detailed Competitive Analysis 🔗
BRAINSTORMING IDEAS
The Challenge
How might we create an app that not only helps students plan and cook healthy meals at home but also keeps them motivated to continue doing so?
Given that, there's a need among users for better social and community features within these apps, I came up with the idea to create a Community page on the app. Through this users can share their recipes, see what their friends are cooking and their recipes, etc.
Furthermore, I prioritized all the features based on their efficiency to deliver an optimal experience and demand by users, using the MOSCOW model: Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, and Will Not Have.
and creating rough sketches to explore various layout options and user flow possibilities to ensure an intuitive experience. The sketches represent just the beginning stages of our thoughtful approach. . .
Additionally, I categorized all the user- suggested features into three categories: Community, Meal Planning, and Grocery Planning.
DESIGNING THE FINAL PRODUCT 🫶🏻
➡️ Onboarding the user to the app
The onboarding process is a step-by-step journey that takes users' health and dietary preferences into account to understand their diet.
It starts with the sign-in process and then requests information such as height, weight, gender, and age. Subsequently, it gathers details about their diet by asking for their dietary preferences (e.g., vegan), allergies, and ingredient dislikes.
Following this, users are directed to the 'Add People' tab, allowing them to connect with others on the app, and facilitating interactions through the Community tab, where they can see what their friends are cooking, share recipes, etc.
➡️ Building a community
I introduced the Community tab, allowing users to view what their friends nearby are cooking along with the recipes.
Users can also share pictures of their own meals by adding recipes from their 'My Recipe' section, complete with an optional caption for the post.
This feature stands out as the highlight of the app, it not only helps students motivate their friends and themselves by showcasing cooking activities but also encourages interaction through likes and the ability to save friends' recipes to their own collection. This way, users can cook the same dishes their friends are enjoying.
➡️ Planning weekly meals
The Meal Planner assists users in easily adding meals for weekly breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Clicking on the ‘+’ icon directs users to the Search tab, where they can search for specific meals or select from suggestions. The filter option enables users to refine their search by ingredients in their pantry with the Pantry-based Suggestion toggle. This caters to users since they prefer spontaneous grocery shopping and deciding on meals based on what they purchase. Unlike other meal-planning apps, our approach aligns with this dynamic shopping style users usually follow.
Users can view the recipe, cook time, nutrition value, and ingredients of a meal. Each meal is categorized with a tag indicating its difficulty level - easy, intermediate, or difficult. Additional options include saving a recipe to the Saved Recipes Collection.
If a user decides to cook a recipe, they can simply press the ‘Cook’ button, which will provide step-by-step instructions for meal preparation.
➡️ Planning groceries through lists
The Grocery tab serves two main purposes. Firstly, it assists users in monitoring their stocked items through the Pantry tab. Here, users can track food expiration tags, ensuring timely usage of items about to expire. Secondly, the Shopping List tab enables users to create a list of items they need to purchase. Items are automatically added to the Shopping List when a user adds a recipe to the meal planner, based on the ingredients needed for that meal.
Both lists are organized into categories such as Dairy, Spices, Bakery, etc., and are editable, allowing users to add or remove items according to their preferences. As users consume or purchase items from the Pantry or Shopping List tabs, respectively, they can click on the circular checkbox to remove the item from the list.
➡️ Managing ‘My Account’
The My Account section focuses on providing users with full access. Users can change their diet type at any point as they make adjustments to their diet routine.
There are two collections: Saved Recipes and My Recipes. Saved Recipes are recipes that users browse, like, and save for future reference, whereas My Recipes is a collection of recipes the user has created and added.
There’s also a feature to set reminders for meal planning and cooking times, allocating specific hours of the week to these activities.
TESTING THE PRODUCT
The usability test was conducted with 3 participants, involving 3 scenarios with two tasks each (mentioned below),
‣ Complete the onboarding process
‣ Explore the app for 3-4 minutes while thinking out loud
‣ Look up a specific recipe and save it for cooking later
‣ Add a specific recipe to the meal planner for a specific date’s lunch
‣ Post a picture of a meal they cooked with its recipe
View detailed Usability Test 🔗
Design Recommendations
➡️ Most users got confused between the ‘Save’ and ‘Add’ buttons. They thought both buttons served the same function of adding meals to the planner, whereas 'Save' is specifically for adding recipes to the ‘Saved Recipes’ collection.
➡️ The ‘Add’ button should be added in front of ‘Breakfast’, ‘Lunch’, and ‘Dinner’ separately on the Meal Planner tab.
➡️ Users demanded that a calorie tracker for the day would be a beneficial addition for them.
➡️ ‘All recipes,' 'Saved Recipes,' and 'My Recipes' appeared confusing to users when placed directly on the Search tab.
➡️ The confirmation messages were getting lost in the background and were not easily noticeable.
➡️ It wasn't intuitive for users to click on the specific meals listed on the Search tab, indicating that the meal buttons didn’t appear clickable for obtaining more information about a specific meal’s recipe.
➡️ 'Add People' should provide more information about what adding people will accomplish and its purpose.
➡️ Creating a post should have an option to edit the recipe and its picture through the Post tab itself instead of going to the My Recipes page.
“It's our first time living on our own for a lot of us students so this app would be really helpful to us and it will build the habit of cooking fresh meals, cooking frequently, and buying groceries as and when needed.”
“I would download this app for sure. Seems familiar even though it’s new to me.”
After completing the tasks, participants filled out a post-test questionnaire, which included questions to determine the System Usability Scale (SUS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
➡️ SUS 85%
➡️ NPS +66%
➡️ CSAT 100%, 66%, 66%
LEARNINGS AND NEXT STEPS
This project has revealed valuable insights into both the strengths and areas for improvement within the current design.
Being a new concept of creating a community on the platform, it taught me the importance of introducing novel features to users and helping them acclimate with minimal learning curves.
The next steps involve implementing a more intuitive design. Addressing identified issues, such as confusing buttons, will be crucial to enhancing the seamlessness of the product. Additionally, developing a comprehensive user guide will play a pivotal role in introducing users to the app's unique concept and functionalities.