Food Planner
An app to help users plan their meals, keep track of their food supplies and avoid food waste.
Problem
Very often we buy too much food or don’t realise we have food left in our fridge until it has expired and we have to throw it away.
Food waste is a big problem and it can be addressed by better organising our buying and consumption.
Persona
Jane is a graphic designer who lives alone in a big city. She has an average income and spends less than a quarter of her monthly income on food. She mostly prepares meals at home and sometimes goes out to a restaurant
with her friends. Her busy lifestyle doesn’t leave her much time for cooking or grocery shopping.
User Journey
The user journey describes the main touch points that the user goes through when trying to achieve their goal. The relative size of each touch point indicates its relative importance or the amount of time spent, while the emotion chart indicates the user's feelings while going through the user user journey.
Storyboard - Negative scenario
Storyboard - Positive scenario
Paper prototype
Link to the prototype in the Marvel app: https://marvelapp.com/prototype/55c8c5h
User feedback:
The absence of an onboarding screen or an introductory screen to make the user familiar with the interface;
Navigation to previous screens missing at times;
No need to have alert badges for each changed state, only for the important notifications;
No need for multiple shopping lists for each recipe, only one long consolidated list.
Wireframes
Link to interactive prototype in Figma: https://bit.ly/384KtJs
Usability Study
Task 1
Buy a food item and store it in your fridge inventory on the app.
Task 2
Search for a recipe for the food item close to its expiry date. Save the recipe in your weekly meal planner, for Tuesday.
Task 3
Go back to the recipe you saved in the weekly planner (Tuesday) and export the ingredients to a new shopping list. Then go back to the list of recipes.
Lessons learned from the usability study:
Overall high usability success rate (50-93%);
The questions in random order may be confusing for some users;
The simplest questions have the highest success rate;
Most users choose an alternative success path;
Users have difficulty with some questions outside the use context;
Some users recommend that the buttons on the recipe detailed view should be visible on the first screen;
Some difficulties with navigation to previous screens.