Meal Swap

An application to organize, exchange and enjoy homemade meals.

Brief

Use the power of technology to create an application or service that facilitates personal or social behavior change.

Problem

With our day to day busy schedules, getting homemade meals on the table can be a daunting task. Even with some planning, unforseen circumstances are bound to happen. For these instances, bloggers have shared ways of creating freezer meals at home and setting up meal exchange events with your friends. The advice typically involves lots of preplanning, back and forth emails, phone calls or texts, time and of course money. In the age of digital, it's a very manual process. And who has time for that?

Target Audience

The target audience is made up of people who enjoy cooking, but are limited by their work/home lifestyle to execute home-made meals everyday. These users might be singles who might find it difficult to cook for one, working parents, or perhaps couples that have unpredictable hours.

Solution

Meal Swap is a tool that would allow users to quickly organize and manage a meal swap with their friends and family from any digital device. The tool full-fills several other user needs: satisfy enjoyment of cooking, save time and money by cooking one meal rather than multiple, provide several homemade, freezer-ready meals, and provide a place for people to share recipes that they enjoy with their friends and/or family. Once a member sets up a group and swap date using the tool, each group member will select one dish to make in a large batch that will then be divided among the other group members. During the organized swap, each member goes home with a freezable, home-made meal from each of the other group members.

Needfinding

In order to come up with requirements for the interface, I observed how people currently plan and execute meals for themselves or their families and how it plays into their work/home lifestyle. All three participants yielded very different insights that could potentially produce different types of products. I made a list of specific goals based on my observations, found design inspiration, and researched existing meal planning market.

Exploration

During this phase, I created storyboards that addressed two design ideas. It was important to consider how the application would be used in real life and under what circumstances someone would go to the site. Personas were also formed to represent the range of users. After selecting a storyboard and creating a quick user flow, I created two variations of rapid, interactive prototypes, that varied in interface but offered the same functionality. The prototypes were produced quickly, tested, refined, and repeated to improve on the design and quickly eliminate the paths that don't work. Testing throughout this phase was done through peer review.

Once the rapid prototypes were refined further, Heuristic evaluations were performed to analyze the design for usability issues.
Taking into account the severity rating, I implemented changes before moving onto high fidelity prototypes.

Concept Refinement

Next I created a development plan that would be use for the hi-fidelity rapid prototypes. In it I outlined specific components and their respective deadlines, while taking into account any outside constraints. For this prototype, I selected one of two wireframes from the previous phase.

USER TESTING

In order to conduct user testing, I developed an evaluation plan that outlined the goals of the testing, who the participants would be, the methodology of testing, tasks, and how I would measure success. I then created my test materials and recruited participants. For this user testing I was also assigned to redesign one component of the prototype in order to gain additional feedback when comparing the two designs.

View the prototype

RESULTS

After conducting the three user tests, the overall feedback for the Meal Swap app was that the application's interface was very clean, easy to read and follow, and the testers appreciated that the main tasks that a user of this app might want to do was all visible on the main page. No scrolling or digging around was necessary to get to these main tasks. I also found that the testers liked that the application wasn't trying to do too many things; it focused on organizing and managing a meal swap and it did it well to make it quick and easy to do. That being said, there were issues that came up that needed to be resolved through additional iterations.

Changes to Implement

Make both icons and labels clickable. This would avoid frustration/confusion and the guesswork as to what is clickable.
Rethink the app logo so it is easier for users to decipher at the smallest size.
Incorporate a way to quickly email or text all group members or several members. Currently you can only contact group members individually. Adding this feature would come in handy for users when they want to ask a group question or make a comment to more than one person in a group.

Reconsider how the group name is displayed on the homepage to work against any image a group may select. Its important for readability that the name is displayed correctly against various background types.
Have bars/buttons/links provide feedback to the user by changing the color on tap so they know what they selected. Finger sizes can sometimes trigger the wrong link, even when the user is tapping on a link very fast.
Reword "Email" and "Message" in individual contact view, so it's easier to differentiate between sending an email to a contact versus sending an instant text.

Consider adding text or a label guiding users to where they can suggest a new date or time for the next swap if the current date or time doesn't work for them. Currently the user must already know that this can be found in the calendar view. A new user may not know this.
When selecting a date, allow user to select it directly on the calendar as oppose to tapping on plus and minus buttons. Make both symbols on the button larger or have it popup so it's easier for your fingers to use on a mobile phone.

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