Eat-In Meal Planning App

If you’ve ever come home from work and realized you’re starving and don’t know what to cook, we understand your problem. We set out to provide a solution that would help people minimize food budget by using what they already have, and offering quick and simple meal ideas, which helps people eat out less. This progress is measured by users tracking when they cook on an in-app calendar, and “favoriting” meals.

The Problem

Young professionals have a hard time finding easy ways to cook meals at home and developing their skills in the kitchen. As a result they waste food and money. 

An easy way to lower food cost, minimize food waste, and find quick, simple meals to cook, would lead to a healthier lifestyle while maintaining a budget due to the reduced amount of eating out.

The Solution

Eat-In is an app that allows you to:

  • Find recipes based on what you already have

  • Creates your grocery list for quick shopping trips

  • Make plans to cook and track your progress

 

The Impact

Two features were added to measure the success of Eat-In. The first is a progress calendar that marks off days the user has cooked a meal based on a checkmark they click in the recipe when it’s in their weekly meal plan. The second is the favoriting feature. It not only allows users to keep a collection of their most loved meals, but also lets them see how many other people like those meals before they cook it.

 

The Team

Erin Yurk
Janice Landree
Catherine Champion
Julian Garcia

 

My Key Roles

Project Manager
Lead UI Design

The Research

User interviews and surveys were used to gain user insight with three main goals:

  • Discover users’ current meal preparation habits

  • Understand what might make meal planning easier

  • Learn how grocery shopping habits relate to cooking habits

Key Insights

After reviewing the research, it became apparent there were a few key features that would help Eat-In’s audience plan their meals:

  • Digital recipe ideas with images for easy browsing

  • Pre-made grocery list for better organization and speed

  • Ways to use what they already have on hand to reduce food waste

We reached these conclusions by creating an affinity map to find patterns across all interviewees. Those groups of answers were then divided into likes, needs and dream features in order to better understand what functions would help our users get the most out of our app. We then placed them into a prioritization matrix to help us calculate technical feasibility and bandwidth.

Affinity Map

Users’ Likes, Needs and Dream Features

Prioritization Matrix

User Persona

With these insights in mind, Chris Johnson was created to help us better empathize with our users. This allowed us to succinctly note our users’ goals, such as cooking more, using food on-hand, exploring new recipes, and making healthier food choices. It also gave us a place to feel for Chris’ pain points like figuring out what to eat when he’s already hungry, having a busy schedule that leaves less time for cooking, and wasting food because there’s no plan for what to cook with it.

User Journey

Knowing the goals and pains of our user, we then mapped out what their journey might look like and drew a storyboard to help pinpoint the emotions that may be felt along the way. Based on these exercises we discovered a few opportunities to make for a more pleasant user experience such as:

  • Allow users to search by ingredients

  • Show images of meals to help users make quick decisions

  • Allow users to find meals by cook and prep time

  • Make grocery shopping easier by automatically creating a list from meals chosen

  • Track how often users are cooking meals (based on user input) to encourage positive progress

User Flow

After gaining an understanding of user needs, feelings, and journeys we mapped out how one might navigate through the app. Version 1 lacked definition in the “Select Diet & Allergies” flow. Version 2 accounted for that lack by detailing how the users arrived at those selection points, and also revised the way users favorited meals vs. the original idea of giving meals a star rating.

User Flow V1

User Flow V2

 
 

Wireframes

Low-Fidelity Wireframe Sketches

Mid-Fidelity Digital Wireframes

Prototyping and Testing

After sketching wireframes and then creating a digital iteration, users were brought in for feedback via guerrilla testing. As no project is perfect on the first try, there were three main issues found.

During this first round 80% of users didn’t understand how to track their meal progress or what the checkmark icon meant.

When asked to create a grocery list from their meal plan, 60% of users mistook the “add” button for a retail shopping cart.

Lastly, the search feature that allows users to find meals based on name or ingredients was not intuitive for any of the users.

Iterations

Based on the above issues we iterated on our wireframes when creating our high-fidelity prototype. The search bar was placed at the top of the meal selection page to immediately inform users how to filter meals based on ingredients or meal types with fewer clicks.

The action of checking off a cooked meal was moved from the weekly meal plan (though this page still lets you see if a meal is marked cooked or not) and placed directly on the recipe pages when clicked through from the weekly meal plan page. It was also labeled “Cooked?” to guide users as to the purpose.

The grocery list creation button was changed from an icon to a labeled button. Not only is this more direct, but it also aligns with usability heuristics of consistency and recognition by dedicating that space to the add meal button, which users have previously seen on the recipe pages.

 

Next Steps & Future Opportunities

Following the updates made in response to the mid-fidelity user testing, the next step is testing the high-fidelity prototype to ensure those changes are effective and intuitive. We can then measure the increase or decrease in our modifications and iterate again if needed.

To further improve Eat-In, there are also plans to design and implement grocery budget tracking, sharing and collaborating to allow people to plan meals together, and video tutorials to help users master their skills.