RecipEat

Meal prep companion app for college students learning how to cook

In one of my current business classes, I was assigned to a team and tasked with designing a solution to a well-established need. My team and I are working on the research and development of a meal-planning mobile app geared towards helping college students learn to cook efficiently within their budget.

The design of the app will be directly based on the user research and prototype validation we are working on. Through our interactions with our peers, my team and I observed the various difficulties college students faced when grocery shopping and meal planning. After the need was identified, we conducted a series of surveys, ethnographic research sessions, and customer interviews to gain a deeper understanding of the problem’s source. Our users communicated their frustrations with the amount of time they spend grocery shopping and the overwhelming number of online recipes, so we focused our low-fidelity prototypes on the consolidation of the available resources. We completed our initial round of validation interviews, in which our users responded positively to the direction our app is going in. We were also able to gain additional insights into more user types that would benefit from our app.

As a UI/UX designer on the team, I analyzed the user needs and worked to create this series of prototypes based on the feedback we got from our surveys and interviews. My focus of these prototypes was to design an interface concept that maximized efficiency for the user and allowed them to interact with a potential workflow. This led me to leverage a more conventional style of interface design to maximize user comfort and reduce the amount of time they would need to spend learning about the app, which was especially important when asking them for additional feedback on the concept.