A Meal Exchange App to Simplify Your Life

Summary

Time, recipe ideas, and money often come up as issues when deciding what to cook or whether it is even worth it. Meal prepping and sharing meals can cut down on cooking time, and recipe burnout. We created an app that makes it simple to cook and exchange meals with friends, family, and neighbors.

Problem Statement

Cooking takes time. Grocery shopping takes time. Finding which recipe you want to make takes time. Meal prep helps ease those problems, but eating the same dinner five nights in a row gets old. Introducing — a meal exchange app.

Research

We wanted to learn how often people cook, if they run out of recipes to cook, and if they had heard of a meal share program before. The survey helped us get a large base of our target audience and their cooking preferences. The in-person and phone interviews helped us gain a better understanding of what they thought about meal prep and meal sharing. Research showed that meal share programs are well-known, but not used very often.

The majority of our users cooked 3–5 times per week, had leftovers 1–2 times per week, and time was the #1 factor that got in the way of cooking. We also learned that our users didn’t typically eat their leftovers.

The number of times that our users cooked each week would determine the group that they would create. Users within a group would ideally want to cook the same number of times each week so each of their meal needs would be met. This way, if a user typically cooked 3–5 times per week and was in a meal exchange group with 5 other people, it would cut down on their cooking time. They would cook their meal in bulk and receive 5 other meals to eat throughout the week.

Food waste was one of the reasons that people had started meal exchange programs. Our survey had responses that told us that would be one of the main reasons that people would be interested in using a meal exchange app. Cooking meals in bulk is part of the solution. They cook multiple of one meal, but don’t have to eat the same food every day and lessen the chance of throwing out food they are sick of eating.

Combining that research information with our user's responses about their own leftovers was the starting point for designing the preferences page for the mobile app. Creating meal exchange groups with similar meal needs is the base that we needed to best serve potential users. What type of food they eat and food allergies were the most important pieces of information for the preferences page of the app. Users could try new food or stick to what they like and if necessary, create groups based on food allergies so they wouldn’t have to worry about having an allergic reaction.

The survey responses showed us that there was space for a meal share app. Time and recipe ideas were the driving forces of what prevented people from cooking, so we decided to focus on those as problems that our app would solve. Being a member of a meal share program gives the user exposure to a wide range of recipes, cuts down on their cooking time, and grocery shopping burnout.

Users and Audience

Our research survey and interviews helped us create our design persona. The participants answered the most often that they would be open to using a meal exchange app and that it would simplify their lives. The time-effective aspect of joining a meal exchange program appealed to many of the surveyed and interviewed audience.

We created a user, based on our research, that we could help achieve their goals through the meal share app.

Meet Lucy :

Roles and Responsibilities

I worked with two other designers on this project. The research process was all based on collaboration with each other. We worked on low-fidelity wireframes together and used those to improve the user flow. I designed the high-fidelity wireframes and prototyping independently.

Scope and Constraints

This project was limited to one month while working in a remote environment. The other two designers in my group were in different time zones. One in Texas and one in Virginia. The time difference didn’t put too much cramp on our ability to get done what was needed, but working remotely strained our ability to communicate. We used Sketch to create our prototypes and that limited live collaboration as we made changes to the wireframes.

Process

Our research started with googling the existence of meal share programs. and how they have been set up. We found similar blog posts about peoples experiences with being a part of a meal share program. Their existence gave a good structure for what we should include in our wireframes.

Our plan was to create an app that allowed a meal exchange program to succeed within an app. Research brought up an interesting point: we found that a meal exchange app doesn’t exist. There are recipe apps and there are meal prep apps. There is not an app that brings those two things together.

Recipe app research gave us a good idea of possible app layout. We wanted our app to be familiar to potential users. This research helped us see that adding a recipe database to the app would add value for the users. They would be able to plan what they were going to make while planning their meal exchange dates and times.

Understanding recipe app layouts and meal share programs gave us a strong base for our survey and interview questions. We learned that time and running out of recipes to make were the most common obstacles our users had. Each member of our design group moved forward with wire-framing a group of screens that would make up our entire app. We discussed each of our sketches and moved forward with what we wanted to include in our digital wireframes. I designed the sign-in page, the home page, calendar page, the side menu, and the group member page.

Exporting our designs to Invision helped us see the gaps in screens that we hadn’t designed yet. Creating a flow for the users to access the calendar and group members page were the two main missing links we had to re-design. We also took the redesigning opportunity to work on consistency across the wireframes.

In the first wireframes, we created a radius/search page that would allow the users to add users to a group. This page presented a problem when we started wire-framing. The process of using a radius to search for potential group members did not work well. There wasn’t a way to connect users simply through the location. It would have taken a redesign and further research to include that feature in the app. I decided to not include this feature in the high-fidelity designs because of those reasons.

That feature didn’t add immediate value for the users. They would still be able to create groups by adding contacts or inviting people through a link. Getting rid of the radius/search option simplified the flow. It was a good decision to make before the high-fidelity designs became too detailed.

Once we had finished our first round of wireframes and low fidelity designs, I was in charge of creating the high-fidelity designs. I browsed dribble for color and design inspiration and looked at food apps I had on my own phone. There didn’t seem to be one color fits all for recipe/food delivery apps. I didn’t expect there to be but I had a difficult time choosing a color that fit the feel of the app we had designed. I had found a purple color that looked appealing, so I incorporated it into the high-fidelity designs. I thought the color looked good but wasn’t sure if it fit the app. I decided to move forward with the color and make sure to ask for feedback about it in an upcoming design review and during user testing.

Once the first set of high-fidelity designs were complete, I did several user tests as did the other designers I had worked with. There were two main problems that came up during user testing. The log-in and sign-up buttons on the first page looked the same. Several users just clicked the log-in button when the task we had assigned them was to create an account. I researched log-in/create account pages and found some ideas on how to better differentiate the two and also brought up the issue during one of our design reviews. Between the research and a design review, I decided to make the sign-up option into a very clear button so it would be more obvious. The log-in option still looked clickable but didn’t take attention away from the sign-up button.

The second challenge that came up in user testing was the color I had chosen. After each user test, I asked what they thought about the design of the app. The purple color came up several times as an unexpected color choice. Two of the users felt strongly that it didn’t fit a food/recipe app. It reminded them of a sleep or meditation app. The feedback helped me decide to change the main color I used in the design. Although the color I had chosen didn’t go over well in the user testing, I was glad that I went through with it as part of my design. I spent a lot of my design time trying to pick the “perfect” color. That was not possible. I knew that user testing and design reviews would be an opportunity to get more ideas on the color of the app. If I thought I chose the best color for the app before I received feedback, it would have been difficult to make changes. I would have been attached to my original decision. The color yellow was thrown around after user testing and a design review, so I started experimenting with different shades.

Yellow also stood out to me because it is recognized as a common color used in food apps. This solidified the goal to create an app that was recognizable and simple for users to interact with. I didn’t want the color scheme to be overwhelming so I used yellow as the main accent color with grey for text. The color feedback highly improved the app design and created recognizability for what the purpose of the app was.

Outcomes

There was a lot to learn from this design process and app creation. There were two things that I look back on that kept pulling me back into focus so we could design what we wanted the app to accomplish.

1. Research and User Testing are your best friends. When I first started the project with the other two designers, I had an idea of how I would use this app and that I would have loved to use it in college with friends or roommates. Our research pulled us in a different direction and showed that it would be better catered for busy parents. It was difficult to let go of what I had envisioned the app to be for myself, but once I did the app design came together.
2. Collaborate and Iterate. I spent a lot of time on video calls with the two designers working on this project. There were days when we were on the same page and days where our thought processes and design ideas were completely opposite. Visually representing our ideas and constantly giving feedback and tweaks strengthened us as a team. Each meeting brought us closer to what we wanted the app to look like and how we wanted it to work. Collaborating and iterating our designs over and over gave us a great design and flow for our users. A beneficial user experience is what we aimed to create to simplify our user's lives and the Meal Exchange App accomplishes that.