The Proposal
Daily challenges of juggling work, family, and personal commitments, leaves little time for meal planning and cooking.
EZ MEALZ allows users to easily explore prepared meals that fit their unique dietary needs and lifestyle. Users can compare prep meals and use unique dietary filters with just a few clicks.
Challenge
How might we create a mobile app that offers an inclusive design with filters catering to all dietary needs and eliminating the frustration of having to search across multiple third-party platforms?
Key Objective
Seamless Meal Exploration: Enable users to effortlessly explore the range of prepared meals available by providing clear and concise meal descriptions, images, and pricing information. Implement an effective search and filtering system that allows users to find meals based on their unique dietary needs and lifestyle preferences.
Feedback and Review System: Implement a user-friendly feedback and review system that encourages users to share their opinions and experiences. Allow users to rate meals and provide written reviews, enabling future users to make more informed decisions.
Our team worked together to build an app that allows users to quickly browse and find the prep meals they are looking for. By using the categorized filter system they can easily pick what fits their dietary and lifestyle needs with just a few clicks.
Role: UX/UI Designer
Timeline: 1 month
Tools: Figma, Miro, Excel, Google Slides, Google Forums, and Procreate
Market Research
During the discovery stage, our primary objective is to comprehend the users needs by asking comprehensive questions, exploring user difficulties, and determining the extent of our knowledge.
We actively brainstormed potential issues, sought desired outcomes, identified various user types, and pinpointed challenges. This process enabled us to uncover any underlying assumptions we may have held about the app and its users, and allowed us to devise strategies for testing and validating those assumptions.
Competitor Analysis
This is a valuable tool for evaluating our app's features in direct comparison to those offered by our competitors. This analysis has proven instrumental in spotting market trends and identifying potential opportunities with greater ease.
By identifying user behavior, we gained valuable insights into users' expectations regarding other meal prep services. This knowledge enabled us to incorporate familiar features that users have encountered before, resulting in an intuitive and user-friendly solution that is easy to navigate.
User Research
Following the completion of our market research, we proceeded to conduct user research. To initiate this phase, we sent out a survey through text messages and emailed our contacts.
For a more thorough demographic representation, we created Google Forums to include individuals from various age groups and backgrounds. The objective was to gain insights into their experiences with meal prep services.
Quantitative Data
What the datA tells us
AFFINITY MAP
A comprehensive Affinity Map was developed to visually depict the achievements, values, pain points, and habits. This involved incorporating firsthand statements from participants, enabling a more thorough analysis of the functionalities and processes involved.
From the data we then create an affinity map that serves as a valuable tool to organize and analyze qualitative research, enabling us to uncover common themes and trends among their users.
After adding participants input, we as a team categorized them into four main groups. After that was done we then voted on two inputs from pain points and values. This will be the foundation for developing an app that addresses those needs.
User Persona
To better understand our users and provide a user-friendly app, we created a user persona named Chad Lewis, by incorporating key insights collected from our data.
The user persona is an important part as it humanizes our primary user group, it creates a better understanding and empathy towards the challenges they encounter in their daily lives.
By embodying the persona, we prevent the risk of unintentionally creating a solution that caters to our own needs rather than the users.
User Journey
A user journey map serves as a visual depiction of the customer experience, providing valuable insights from the user's perspective.
It plays a pivotal role in user experience design and optimization, enabling us to enhance the overall user experience by understanding their journey through various touchpoints.
Solution
MoSCoW
By using the MOSCOW technique, we can prioritize and allocate resources effectively, ensuring that the most critical features are developed and delivered first. While also considering additional features based on available time, resources, and user needs.
Once we had prioritized the crucial features, we revisited our compiled information to ensure a seamless connection between our product and the target market. This step was key in ensuring that our product adequately caters to the needs of potential users.
USER FLOW
A user flow is a visual representation or diagram that outlines the steps a user takes to accomplish a specific task or goal within a website, application, or system. It illustrates the path a user follows, including the actions they take and the screens or pages they encounter along the way.
Once we established a basic concept of how our app would operate, we progressed to the stages of prototyping and testing.
Wireframes & Prototype
Lo-FiDeLITY
To swiftly iterate a potential app design, we utilized Procreate to generate low-fidelity sketches. This enables us to explore various design possibilities efficiently.
But before we started the sketches we wrote down the features we wanted to implement.
- (Start browsing) option on the sign-up/sign-in page. This removes the pressure of having users having to commit to signing up and instead start browsing our selection.
- (Categorizing the filters option) This narrows the search by selecting key filter options that decreases users scrolling time.
- (Personal Customization) We implemented the ability to select delivery dates that best fits the users schedule.
Mid-fidelity prototype
Hi-Fidelity Prototypes
After thoroughly analyzing the user feedback received from our mid-fidelity prototype, we primarily made minor adjustments to the placement of headings, buttons, button labels, and navigation elements.
With these refinements in place, we proceeded to implement our mid-fidelity prototypes with vibrant colors, text, and food photos, bringing our final design to life.
User Testing
We incorporated remote moderated and unmoderated testing techniques for this product. These are the most feasible for us and our product due to time constraints and scheduling issues. Ideally, an in-person moderated or unmoderated method would be the most feasible and preferred. In-person would provide us with more behavioral contexts of the user and nuances of our application.
The tasks we would like the user to complete in these usability tests are to open the app and reach order confirmation with minimal frustrations through two pathways: login in and create an account. The metrics we will use to measure success will be if the user can get from point A to point B with limited frustrations.
Results
Users were able to complete the function(s) asked of them on the prototype, however, the following improvements & concerns should be addressed:
- Create more product landing pages off of the scrolling menus on the Menu page
- Users wanted more nutrition information and facts to be displayed
- Being able to utilize the search bar, in addition to filters
- Adding detailed filters to include specific fad diets, more allergy options, etc.
- Adding an About Us, Contact, and FAQs page + a functional menu bar
- Giving users an option to use the menu bar before signing in/signing up
- Make text and some functional buttons larger to make it easier for users
Next Steps
Before we can finalize the app we still need to improve on our design and conduct more user testing.
Listed below are features we will love to add in the future:
- Communicate the frequency of updates, new, meals, seasonal menus, etc.
- Implement a meal/diet quiz to help users easily find the best filters for their specific needs.
- Integrate rewards & point program.
Thank you for sticking around and reading this case study. Have a great day!
