As the sole UX Designer, my goal was to not only come up with a solution for my statement problem, but to grasp how each design step was helpful in getting me there. Details of what I learned will be provided at the end of each section using the lightbulb icon.
During Covid lockdown, my friends and I were constantly talking about food. We love to share restaurant recommendations, recipes and cooking tips. Occasionally, some of my friends would talk about how they're trying out different methods to lose weight. This brought me back to when I was a teenager, trying to manage my own weight.
Needless to say, I empathized with their struggle. I know my friends are busy working professionals and having to think about their diets can be exhausting so I was curious to see how I could design a solution to tackle this problem.
Empathizing with my friends and choosing a problem happening close to me gave me motivation to find a solution.
During my secondary research, I found some pretty interesting statistics.
The research gave credence to my objective, which was to identify users who want to improve their diet but struggle to do so and to provide solutions to help them.
In order to learn more about the problem, I sent out a survey to my friends and family, screening for anyone who felt that the state of their physical health needed improving. I was interested in learning the following about my participants:
Interviewing allowed me to see first-hand that the problem was widespread and real, and that people are struggling in different ways.
After interviewing 5 participants, I got back a lot of data points. In order to make sense of it all, I created an affinity map to see if I could derive any insights when they were organized.
From the data, I was able to derive these key insights translated into solution requirements.
Affinity mapping was surprisingly effective when it came to drawing insights. Grouping the data points together allowed me to get a big picture idea of the problem and translate that into solution requirements. The process itself was really fun and engaging as well.
After getting a better understanding of the data and how it should inform my solution, it led me to create two distinct personas, one for users who cook and one for those who don't, translating their pain points and needs into additional feature design requirements.
I really enjoyed creating the personas because it helped represent the data in a way that I could relate to, making it easier to come up with a solution.
During brainstorming, I generated many different ideas that could have been potential solutions. However, according to my research, most people prefer to gauge their health on a daily basis, using more intuitive means like judging their energy levels and overall mood. This means having a food log of what they ate in the past will not really be helpful. Instead the focus should be in the present moment and what they're deciding to eat.
I also decided against gamification because for my users, being healthy wasn't something they can win and then stop, it's a lifelong commitment. Alternatively, using a point system for food makes the experience feel like a zero-sum game and the concept of food becomes one of scarcity which can have negative mental health effects.
Below are some sample solutions I had brainstormed.
After referring back to my research, I finally decided that building a meal prep app would be the best idea given the user's needs and goals. But before finalizing on it, I evaluated other competitors to see what was already being offered and how my app could do better.
From my interviews, I learned that not everyone eats the same, therefore customizing serving portions according to a user's health profile can help to minimize their cravings.
Lastly, most people don’t read nutritional labels. They feel the labels don't translate into helpful information they can use. In order to empower users to make healthier choices, it was important to help them understand the impact an ingredient has on their health.
Completing the competitive analysis of major brands gave me new feature ideas I could easily incorporate into my service without sacrificing a lot of time.
A meal prep app that has recipes for cooking and also delivers pre-made meals and groceries.
For the solution, I embraced divergent thinking to come up with ideas. I learned that not every idea has to be perfect and sometimes it’s about generating as many as possible to get the thinking process going in order to arrive at the final solution.
After I had the solution idea in mind, I thought about the information architecture of the app and how to best structure it for the features I need. Creating a site map with the top level pages first and then further branching them out helped me establish a clear structure for my app.
Once the information architecture was established, it was necessary to define the MVP. I had a lot of features I wanted to include as a result of requirement gathering but I wanted to focus on testing the concept that it was critical for users to have access to healthy food ASAP since it would have the highest impact to their health. This forced me to define two main routes for the solution: the meal prep flow and a meal purchase flow.
Mapping out the user flow diagram gave me a concrete idea of how the app navigation flow should work and really helped during prototyping when I had to reference it for what to build next.
Below are some sketches and wireframes of key features I wanted to test.
Screens: Splash, Sign up, Health Questionnaire, Meal plan home, Meal detail, Current meals, Grocery list, Orders
I found sketching really helpful for creating fast prototypes for usability testing and making fast changes after receiving user feedback. This process saved me a lot of time and allowed me to focus on the layout and spacing when doing my wireframes.
Throughout usability testing, I identified three major usability issues and made changes to address them, documenting the results.
Overall, testing has been extremely useful in identifying edge cases and confusing copywriting, making iterating over the final prototype more straightforward.
As a brand, I wanted Prepaya to make users feel empowered, be engaging and easy to use, thus I picked a warm color theme.
Having worked through the entire UX Design Thinking process, I had the chance to reflect on each stage of the project and assess whether I've achieved my goals and if there were anything I would do differently.
