SERVICE DESIGN / UX/UI DESIGN

Wirl Meal Planning tool was a project I undertook during a 10 week service design course with Academy XI. The goal of the project was to create a service that encouraged a new B2C offering targeting a new demographic, young families. With the world in a constant state of flux planning the things you can control has never been so important, financally and mentally. In partnership with social enterprise WIRL (Wellness In Real Life) I wanted to create service that would help people get inspired, engage in community and share the load of meal planning amoungst the family.

DISCOVERY

Reflecting on my own journey of recently becoming a Dad admist a global pandemic, I wanted to explore improving the organisation of our own family meals in a more systematic way. Navigating meals and the kitchen have never been a great skill of mine so I wanted to seek out opportunities to make this process easier.

INSIGHTS & TAKEAWAYS

• COVID has highlighted a pivotal shift in food trends, the global environment shaping how we cook
• Reports commenting on the rise of bring food retail experience to your home "Ikea Meatballs at Home"
• The pandemic has encouraged users to plan more and spend less time browsing in store
• Consumers increasing appetite for new tools and gadgets to help improve their in home cooking experiences
• The accelerating trend of food delivery systems and data driven health

RESEARCH > DEFINE > SYNTHESISE

After doing multiple qualitative zoom calls with Mum’s understanding their family grocery shop, cooking and planning process and further quantitative investigations with Dad’s using a google docs surveys I sythesised results into themes in a affinity map, further drew them down into an empathy map and scoped out in a user journey to discover further opportunities and pain point would lead to acculating personas representing my possible end user.

INSIGHTS & TAKEAWAYS

• When meal planning Mum's commented on seeking help from others / sharing recipes vs searching for recipes online.
• COVID directly impacted the way they shopped for groceries, relying more heavily on online shopping and wanting to minise their family exposure to the community.
• The adult means were often commented as being an after thought, kid meals great focus on nuturition
• Dad's commented on working to support their family and having limited time to help
• Challenge shared by 70% of the survey Dad's was confidence in knowing what grocery items to buy for meals

IDEATION > PROTOTYPING

Using various tools to help with meal planning I began to uncover some key features to test with propostive users. Learning from my experiences organising our own weekly shops I was able to cultivate some of the work flow that works for myself and my partner. I decide to use existing tools and analyse their strength and weekness, generate simple story boards and walk through the journey with possible users.

INSIGHTS & TAKEAWAYS

• Mums collective saw value in having a shared system that their partners could refer to when meal planning to share the load of meal planning
• Linking the grocery shop more visually to the meal plan improved confidence in meal planning for Dad's
• Acknowledging the usefulness of digital tools alongside physical tools (writing on the fridge) to clearly identify what stage of the process you are up to
• The importance shopping reflexibility, online grocery shopping integration alongside list making for in store purchases
• Mum's valued meal suggestions from trusted sources, seeing greater value from recipes suggestioned by dietitians over insta Mums

WIREFRAMING > PROTOTYPING

Using Figma I clustered some user flow together to understand the importance and hieracy of information. After going through a number of screen variation and refocused on streamlining the planning / food ordering process

KEY FEATURE SETS IDENITIFIED

• The ability to see 1 week meal plans in one location starting Monday (the working week)
• History of previous week meals to allow for easy reuse of meals that have worked in the past
• Integrate final shopping cart with preferred vendor (opportunity to support small vendors)
• The ability to share recipes within the service communtiy and easily add to week meal plans
• Single login required, can be shared with mutlipe users of the household to share load of planning

KEY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE

• Shorter term > building sub branch of instagram community specifically for families, giving the opportunity to share relatable resources tailored to community needs.
• Mid term > Implement a pilot program from new instagram community for users to engage using an established digital tool such as Trello to understand how people may use this digital tool in their planning process
• Long term > Develop high fidelity prototype screen and users flows to present larger organisation or alternative food chain supplier to further develop a MVP for partnership opportunities

REFLECTION

Given the project was only directed by a single team and solo designers I was limited in the capacity and output of this project. If time allowed I would partner more people to work directly on this project and divide the workload. The time taken to uncover insights from the initial interviews and research took a subtial amount of time for one person and would have been beneficial to share this load.

In further development I this product I would seek to involve more people in the industries such as childcare and the education system. There could be a great opportunity to evolve the space of this app into a curriculum where there engagment of cooking involves kids as well teaching vital skills in planning and cooking.