About
Mend-A-Meal
Mend-A-Meal is an app designed to help home chefs expand their customer base by offering a platform for exposure, secure online payments, and flexibility to work from home without needing marketing. For consumers, it provides an affordable, convenient way to access healthy, customizable home-cooked meals, with options for daily or weekly meal plans.
Designed a platform for Mend-A-Meal, improving home-chef ease to use Conducted usability testing to refine user flows, reducing click rate by 18% and enhancing overall navigation efficiency.
My Role
Led end-to-end research and design as a UX/UI Designer, leveraging usability interviews, Google surveys, and qualitative data analysis to refine user flows, enhance engagement, and drive strategic improvements through iterative testing.
Tools & Methods
Conducted usability Interviews, User Group Outreach, and Accessibility Evaluations to refine user flows. Analyzed user behavior, identified key pain points, and proposed impactful solutions through iterative design, presenting findings and suggestions to stakeholders for continuous improvement.
Figma
POP
Miro
Optimal Workshop
Timeline
16 weeks
Team
4 Designers
My Design Process
What my day to day role looks like?
I led the design for Mend-A-Meal, a user-centric platform connecting home chefs with consumers by offering seamless chef onboarding, customizable meal plans, and secure payments, empowering chefs to grow their reach without marketing hassles. Focused on creating an intuitive, responsive experience to ensure convenience and trust for both chefs and customers. It was a project with a team of 4 people.
My Responsibilities
Designing the Chef Side of application | Qualitative data analysis | Findings and suggestions from Mockups
​​Before we dive into the final designs, let’s explore the initial research that laid the foundation!
My responsibilities for the research included conducting interviews, taking comprehensive notes, and analyzing the obtained data. As our study approach, we picked one-on-one usability interviews and a Google survey. This method allows us to directly communicate with users, allowing us to obtain timely feedback and gain in-depth insights and also grabbing the audience from the other end with a survey.
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We selected 8 participants for the study, including 2 chefs and 6 users as consumers. We had 2 personas for chefs and 2 for the consumers ordering home-cooked food from other similar applications like CookUnity and Factor. This diverse group of participants gave us a thorough grasp of the pain issues experienced by current applications as well as the ability to compare the app's usability to that of competing services.
Research Objective:
1. To understand people’s behavior and their attitude and view towards online food ordering on a daily basis.
2. To understand their needs and expectations regarding daily meals.
3. To understand the pain points of the home chefs who are unable to follow their passion of cooking and who want to become entrepreneurs.
Survey Results:
The above results are the responses by people who choose chef as a user.
1. We found that most of the chefs we interviewed did not have a license to cook, since most were home chefs. They do use social media to advertise their skills, and Instagram was the most popular platform.
2. About half of the chefs we surveyed said they need an app like Mend-a-Meal to help them with delivery and expand their clients. More than half of the home chefs would be willing to obtain a license to improve their business/ratings.
The above results are the responses by people who choose customer as a user.
1. The survey indicates that there is a potential demand for an app that connects customers with home chefs, with over 60% preferring home-cooked meals over restaurant meals.
2. Food quality is a key factor for customers, with over 80% prioritizing it over other factors.
3. Customization options are also important to over 70% of customers.
4. The majority of respondents expect healthy and sustainable meals made with high-quality ingredients.
Before we jump into the solutions, let’s uncover key insights from the user interviews
Chefs are passionate about their work and would love to make their customers happy. All chefs have learned through shadowing experience.
Chefs prefer working freelance over working for a business. They would love using this app to make lasting relationships with their customers and do what they love most, cooking.
Customers prioritize fair and lower prices for homemade meals that are worth their money. They prefer the healthy and fresh alternative to restaurant food, but want to trust the chefs preparing their meals, especially if they can recreate childhood dishes.
Customers value the flexibility of being able to customize orders and control portion sizes and spiciness levels.
To compete with restaurants, home-cooked meals need to be a convenient option for customers,
with flexible delivery schedules that fit their lifestyles
The final analysis from the research feedback and insights
Analysis from research
Convenience and Time-Saving
People save time and effort in the kitchen by offering meal planning and prepping choices. Also, it will benefit particularly those with a busy life like working individuals.
Health and Nutrition
Compared to fast food or restaurant options, home-cooked meals frequently contain fresher and healthier ingredients from getting nutritional value of their meals, making it easier to meet dietary restrictions.
Taste and Customization
Users may delight in dishes that cater to their taste preferences, dietary constraints, and cultural backgrounds, delivering a gratifying and memorable meal experience.
Food Safety
Users can have higher trust in the safety and hygiene of home-cooked meals because they can often evaluate the source of the supplies and the cooking process, ensuring transparency in food preparation.
Let’s explore the user persona that shaped our approach
Anjali Saran
Age: 24
About
Anjali is 24 year old dedicated acting student. She enjoys Indian food. She likes to explore new restaurants and cafe.
Frustrations
1. Limited time for meal preparation.
2. Difficulty in finding healthy and vegan food.
3. Limited access to home cooked meals.
Goals:
1. Convenient meal solutions that fit her busy schedule.
2. Healthy and low calorie meal options.
3. Affordable prices.
Behavior
1. Uses food delivery apps regularly.
2. Searches for healthy and low calorie Indian food options before placing order.
Curious to see how real users shaped the design? Dive into the user evaluation insights that drove key improvements
Usability testing for Mend a Meal was conducted with 8 customers and 2 chefs. Users who were interviewed were 20-50 years of age. There were 5 tasks for each user and 5 open-ended questions.
Usability Format:
• Users create accounts based on chef or customer status.
• Tasks vary based on user role.
• Follow-up questions are asked post-tasks.
• Users receive a Google form with SUS questionnaire and additional questions to gauge app satisfaction.
• Questions vary for customers vs. chefs.
Based on our results we found that most users found Mend-A-Meal very easy to use. Users had faced only minor issues if any. The customers were not familiar with a 'Menu' icon, and so from the results, we see they will take the most time to complete task Based on our other tasks, however, we were able to confirm that the icons were easy to understand for them since these symbols were universal to everyone.
The 'Home', 'History', and 'Profile' icons were universal symbols used. One thing we could have implemented in our design was having the name of each icon pop up when users hover over it. We had initially implemented it into our low-fidelity prototype but were not able to implement it in the high-fidelity one. This was just due to time constraints on our end.
The chef's side was really intuitive as well; however, users struggled the most when asked to complete tasks. Users were asked to add a payment method, but that option was under 'Security and Privacy,' which is why people were confused. We had made changes to the chef's side according to that. Due to time constraints, we were not able to make the necessary changes to the customer side; however, the changes implemented on the chef side will be on the page below.
Sus Score of Final Application
Customer satisfaction (4.5/5)
Chef satisfaction (4.0/5)
Outcome
Created a user-centric product that seamlessly connects home chefs with consumers, offering convenience, flexibility, and trust. My role ensured that Mend-A-Meal’s design effectively addressed the needs of its target audience, balancing usability with the business's goals.
Yay, you're here! Dive into the final designs and see how real user insights transformed our vision into visual innovation
Lets see some initial wireframes before the designs
Below are the final designs
