For Eat's Sake | Pan | Product Design

Smart meal-planning for homemade meals

User research

Personas

Scenarios

Wireframing

Site-mapping

Rapid Prototyping

User testing

Mockups

Overview

Everyone enjoys a home-cooked meal, but making them day after day is not easy. The founders approached me to work on a product that would make it easier to meal plan or home cooks. Specifically, they wanted the product to generate recipes based on dietary restrictions and preferences, and also provide ingredient management via smart-pantry tracking and grocery receipt capture.

User Research: Persona, User Interviews, Pain Points

I started the project by visiting our user persona and conducting 6 user interviews to understand how users value meal planning and cooking at home.

From user interviews, I gained the following main insights about why regular meal planning can be painful:

(1) Meal planning takes a lot of mental energy: pulling recipes from different sources and cross-checking ingredients with what's already in the pantry

(2) Missing ingredients may result in multiple grocery trips

(3) Forgetting to use food items result in much regretted food waste

User Journey

I created a user journey that summarized my user research findings and shared this asset with the founders, who found it illuminating. We discussed the user highlights and pain points, and aligned on which ones to tackle first.

These are the three user stories we agreed to focus on first:

When I am trying to think of recipes, I want to browse a wide variety of them, so I can pick out the ones appropriate for my family.
When I am at the grocery store, I want to know what's in my pantry and fridge, so I can figure out what I need to buy.
When I am meal-planning, I want to remember what's going bad in the pantry and fridge, so I can cook them and not waste food.

Wireframes

I explored possible design solutions through wireframes on paper and in Sketch, keeping the fidelity of the first wireframes low to encourage stakeholder feedback. I increased the fidelity of the wireframes with each successive iteration so that by the time we have had several rounds of design reviews, we had near-mockup fidelity designs.

Focusing on Usability

I conducted user tests after every iteration.

In the following iteration, the set up process groups fields to promote ease of parsing, posts signs to support wayfinding, and uses consistent placement of action buttons to ensure users experience their progression in the product in a linear fashion.

Final Designs