StockPot App Design

The Goal: Create a mid-fi meal planning app prototype for busy, budget-conscious individuals looking to make meals easier and more economical by using ingredients they already have on hand.

Owners: Racheal Arewa, Meredith Burton, Kelcie Matousek, and Amy Rogan
My Role: UX Researcher, UI Designer
Tools: Figjam, Figma, Adobe Illustrator
Time Frame: 3 weeks

Research

Proto Persona

Penny Lane female, 25

Goals and Needs

  • Save money

  • Reduce food waste

  • Learn more about cooking for herself

  • Quick meal ideas

  • Make dinner with friends

  • Help to handle domestic tasks

  • Exploring other cultural foods

  • Has specific dietary needs

Behavioral Demographics

  • Just out of college- living on a budget

    Bachelor’s Degree

  • Teacher

  • Dating, not married

  • Independent

  • Likes to cook and drink boxed wine

Pain Points/ Solutions

  • Hates wasting unused ingredients

  • Hates throwing away her money - rotten veggies in the back of fridge

  • Providing recipes with things on hand

  • Has trouble putting together menu plan/grocery list for week

  • Not enough variety in current diet

  • Tired of same meals on repeat

User Interviews

We wanted to understand…

People's grocery planning and shopping habits

The tools people use to plan and source meals

What factors influence people’s eating habits

Our team conducted 6 user interviews centered around these objectives.

“The hardest part about grocery shopping is preparing a list and figuring out what I actually want to eat.”

– Ellyn

“Sometimes leftovers go bad before I can use them, but I try to account for that by not overbuying.”

– Josephine

“I need something quick and easy that I can throw together with the ingredients I have in the fridge.”

– Amy

Affinity Diagram

Takeaways

  • Focus on quick meals, energy efficient, health-conscious

  • Try to meal prep around their schedules

  • Leftovers kept- not always eaten, worry about food waste

  • Enjoy trying new foods and recipes

  • Simple base ingredients used for multiple dishes

  • Pain Points- Want to be more organized about meal prepping

User Persona

Sydney Campbell

An overloaded business owner, who wants to improve the organization in her life to gain time and energy for her and her partner. She needs help finding budget-friendly and simple meal plan substitutes that reduce food waste.  She doesn’t have time for the grocery store or recipe hunting.

Demographics

  • Age: 30

  • Location: Chicago Suburbs

  • Occupation: Event Planner

  • Status: Married

Goals

  • New Years Resolution to get more organized at home

  • Wants to be more budget conscious

  • Wants to make sure shes taking time to eat

  • Become better at meal planning

Motivations

  • Having enough financial security to explore options

  • Wants to help people- make their events special

  • Being healthy

Needs and Expectations

  • Needs to stick to her schedule

  • Expects domestic chores to be split between her and her partner

  • Time to eat with her husband

  • Needs more time for creative outlets

Pain Points/Frustrations

  • Inconsistency of products in the store

  • Too busy

  • Alway on call for work, easily interrupted

  • Food goes to waste in the fridge

Cooking Influences

  • Pinterest

  • Celebrity chef cookbooks

  • Mom/ sister

  • Husband

The Problem

We believe providing a meal planning app for busy adults, will allow them to create simple, affordable and diverse meals, utilizing ingredients and leftovers they have on hand.

How might we improve upon meal planning apps so that our customers can successfully plan meals with substitutable ingredients that minimize food cost and maximize variety?

The Solution

Providing recipes, utilizing food items that are inclusive of items they have in stock, to reduce waste and ease the burden of meal planning.

Ideation

With our research in mind, we started our ideation process with, our I Like, I Wish, and What ifs. Some examples: 

“I wish I had the ability to plan meals and see how much of a certain ingredient I will need across multiple meals and recipes.”

“What if I could take a picture of my receipt or the food items I bought to populate or log in the app for me.”

“I wish I know how to repurpose some leftovers and refresh them.”

“What if I had presaved grocery lists so I didn’t have to meal plan every week.”

“I wish that I received recommendations based on different tiers of cost.”

Competitor Analysis

Mealime Strengths

Preferences, Meal Planning

Whisk Strengths

Shopping List

SuperCook Strengths

Inventory, Recipe Suggestions

Storyboard

Focusing on features that were feasible, yet meaningful to users further established the following features we wanted to focus on:

Inventory

Meal Planning

Recipes

Grocery Lists

Prototyping

Paper Prototyping

We wireframed seperately and then pulled the most unique and best parts of each of our wireframes and combined them together

User Flows

Based on our competitor analysis and the problem we wanted to solve, our user flows had 4 main features

  • An easy way to for user to log inventory

  • Suggested recipes based on ingredients user have on hand

  • Meal plan feature

  • Grocery list feature

Testing

User Testing Round 2

What we learned:

  • Add meals on more than one day to meal plan

  • Confirmation screen after successfully onboarding or completing a task

  • Add a key for the "you have this" icon under the recipe card

  • Ability to add a new list

User Testing Round 1

What we wanted to know:

  • Can the user easily onboard

  • Log inventory of an ingredient using camera

  • Add recipe to meal plan calendar

  • Add items to shopping list

What we learned:

  • Flow to add a recipe to the meal plan didn’t make sense

  • The ability to add an item to shopping list needed to be built out and show confirmation

  • The camera to log ingredients wasn’t obvious

  • The nav bar, onboarding status, and confirmation screens need improvement

Mid-Fi Prototype

Food for Thought

Takeaways:

There is a current gap between the feasibility of the average allotted time to plan meals and people’s desire to minimize food waste.

Next Steps:

Work on the leftover feature more extensively

  1. Survey how users track their inventory 

  2. Potentially introduce education pieces: instructional videos and tips/tricks

Shareable feature to allow users to collaborate and share meals and lists with family members or roommates