How can we help busy individuals eat healthy while saving money?

What I did

Visual Design

UI Design

Prototype

Usability tests

What I Used

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Illustrator

Figma

Draw.io

Details

Type: Personal Project

Timeline: October 2020 - December 2020

Overview

PrepMe is a Meal Prep app that aims to reduce the amount of time required for meal prepping and at the same time presents the user with the cheapest option available.

The main premise of this app is to help the user organize their meals and provide an easy calendar-based system that allows them to manage their meals.

Simultaneously, provide them with a list of prices offered at various grocery stores for the same products. Thereby, allowing them to choose which supermarket they would want to purchase from.

Problems

Time Management

Planning meals can be time-consuming and cumbersome.

Nutrition

Maintaining a balanced diet is an arduous task for most people.

Organize

Organizing a list of ingredients for every recipe that users would plan to cook for the week can be overwhelming.

Budget

Saving money is a primary reason why people meal-prep. Often times is hard to stick to a budget.

Target Audience

This app is targeted primarily at students who are trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle on a budget. Also, any person who is trying to maintain a diet plan or meal prep while trying to maintain a budget is whom this app is made for.

User Feedback

The idea was to get as many people as possible to use the prototype and tabulate their feedback and analyze it to collect data. This was done to understand how to better serve the user and understand the pitfalls of the app.

The suggestions that came through were then tabulated and prioritized based on the number of times they were mentioned. The final iteration was the product of multiple alterations made based on these suggestions.

The survey entailed questions about which features they liked the most and what features they would like to see implemented. By doing so I was able to gather data about feature prioritization which is vital for any app.

Existing Solutions

The market space that consisted of meal prep app and diet app has saturated over the years and what I have noticed after going through all the top competitors in this space is that the focus on data and information that was presented to the users was relatively high.

There were a few caveats to the existing apps. One of the main problems was that if the user decided to make multiple recipes they would then have to manually note down all the ingredients for each recipe.

I wanted to incorporate as much useful information in the most aesthetically pleasing way as to ensure user retention. Using my artistic background and business knowledge I was able to use the best companies, the current tech giants' designs as guidelines.

I was able to absorb their design aspects into my project and improve upon any areas that could be and add in new functionality to add to the user experience.

Heuristic Evaluation

This was done by conducting surveys on UX designers that were in the field, primarily to find any usability issues the user would face. To ensure that I was able to cover every aspect possible I made had to find 15 accredited UX designers and got their feedback.

Design Iteration

After all, these surveys had been conducted and the design ideas reviewed. The most notable change with the design of the app was the ingredients section. Initially, the app was designed to view where each ingredient was the cheapest to acquire and focused on cutting costs far greater than the ease of use.

After the heuristic evaluation, this functionality was changed to calculating the cheapest option considering all the items on the grocery list put together.

Another such iterative change that was implemented after analyzing the feedback from the survey was that. If an ingredient was a staple and the user already had these available the option to add in a list of staples already available was added.

This was done to ensure if the user had already purchased a certain ingredient then they would not have to purchase it again.

Future Plans

The addition of more nutritional data was another aspect that can be elaborated on as each recipe would have macros displayed and gave the user a more informative description screen that allowed them to calculate macros correctly.

Another such idea was to implement diet recommendations based on the type of ingredients that they would like to purchase. Thereby allowing the user to create a custom diet depending on their personal preference and at the same time make an informed choice based on nutrition.

Prototype