MyMeals - A mobile solution for meal preparation
MyMeals is a meal planning app designed to make cooking more convenient while increasing the variety of meals and reducing food waste.
Created as a team project for NYU Steinhardt’s UX Design course, the app addresses the common pain points in meal preparation that we uncovered in our user research through features tailored to busy, health-conscious users.
Role: UX Designer, Researcher, Lead UI Designer
Team Members: Sophia Meda & Olivia Brown
Timeline: January - May 2025
Tools: Figma, FigJam, Slack, Miro, Maze
The Problem
Young individuals often struggle with the many trade-offs involved in meal planning. While cooking at home is typically healthier and more affordable than dining out, the effort required to find recipes, make shopping lists, buy ingredients, and cook can be overwhelming alongside school or work commitments.
Our team was drawn to this broad and relatable problem space because of its connection to larger systemic issues such as financial decision-making, decision fatigue, and food waste.
How might we make meal planning more convenient, time-efficient, and enjoyable for busy users?
Discovery
We conducted 5 semi-structured interviews with users who had diverse cooking habits. An affinity map helped reveal patterns, including the four key insights below. Our initial interviews also uncovered a few gaps, especially around how users find meal inspiration. We followed up with targeted interviews with the same participants to dive deeper into those themes.
All participants saw value in meal preparation and wanted to cook more, but they were frustrated by affordability, time limitations, and food waste.
User Research Questions:
How do young adults approach meal planning and grocery shopping?
What difficulties do young adults encounter when meal planning and grocery shopping?
What influences young adults’ meal choices?
Key Research Insights:
Time was the biggest overall constraint for interview participants
Variety in what they ate was key
Buying in bulk and using up leftover ingredients were common.
Ideation
We created two personas:
Sage is intrinsically motivated to cook and sees cooking as a great way to be creative and destress.
Olive is extrinsically motivated to cook (e.g., for the health benefits and/or saving money), but tends to eat out frequently due to a lack of planning.
These informed our journey map that outlined five cooking stages: inspiration, planning, shopping, cooking, and eating.
“It just feels good to make meals that are healthy and look nice, so I think cooking is mostly a nice way for me to destress and have a creative space.”
— User quote aligned with our Sage persona
“For me, it’s much more about being able to plan around my schedule and make sure I am eating healthy than it is to come up with a fancy recipe each week.”
— User quote aligned with Olive persona
After creating our journey map, we narrowed our focus to the first three stages and generated “How Might We” statements for each. Through Crazy 8s, storyboarding, and peer critique, we iterated on multiple ideas.
Below are some sketches and a storyboard developed during our ideation phase. We ultimately combined multiple concepts into an app-based solution, MyMeals (originally called MyMenu).
Sketches mapping out possible user flows
Sketch showing Shopping List and Store Comparison
An early storyboard showing our initial concept
Our Alternate (Non-App) solution:
We were also considering a meal subscription box product that gives users nonperishable ingredients for 3-4 versions of a basic recipe. This provides users with weeks worth of food and lets them explore new flavors while keeping most ingredients handy.
To test the concept, we conducted additional research, surveying 15 additional users on meal subscription services like Factor and HelloFresh. While they were convenient, participants were frustrated by the high cost and lack of customizability, so we chose not to move forward with this idea.
Initial sketches from our meal subscription box concept
Design
We started our design process in Miro, creating low-fidelity wireframes that we tested with 3 users. This usability testing had mixed results - users liked the idea but weren’t sure if it fit their needs correctly.
Feature mapping revealed our original designs didn’t fully align with user needs, so we added a Match feature to recommend meals based on existing ingredients.
Initial Sketch of Make a Match Feature
Initial Wireframes in Miro
After adding the match feature, we validated our updated prototype by moderated usability tests with 5 additional participants.
We clarified the UI language, updating confusing feature names, and added an instructional modal to the Make a Match feature to inform users about what this feature entails.
I led our high-fidelity prototyping, which was done in Figma. We conducted asynchronous unmoderated usability testing with 20 users with Maze and resolved final usability issues by improving navigation and button visibility.
Key Features
Upload from Social Media
Our users find recipe inspiration all around them, and with MyMeals, you can import recipes from wherever you find yours.
Are you tired of bookmarking TikTok or Instagram recipes but never using them? MyMeals lets you quickly import recipes directly from your feed, helping you stay organized without stopping your scrolling.
Add a New Recipe
Direct upload from social media
MyMeals & Make A Match
When you figure out what recipe(s) you want to make, add them to MyMeals, and the recipe ingredients will be automatically added to your Shopping List.
From MyMeals, you can Make a Match and create an AI-generated quick meal designed to use up any leftover ingredients from your main meal in some new ways, allowing you to switch it up while minimizing food waste.
Other Features:
Recipe Organization
Search and filter recipes by tags. Upload images or create custom emoji cards.
Stores Nearby
Ingredients are automatically imported from MyMeals and organized by section.
Shopping List
Compare grocery stores based on price, distance, and the availability of items.
Outcomes
9 of 18 users cited uploading recipes from social media as the most valuable feature.
5 users described the store comparison as a unique and highly valued feature, though implementation depends on real-time retail data and may exclude smaller and locally-owned grocers.
The Make a Match feature earned a 3.8/5 satisfaction rating. Users valued the idea but wanted more control over the AI-generated suggestions.
Lessons Learned
Starting with a large problem space gave my team lots of possible directions, and I learned that refining our focus early through research makes it easier to target specific user needs.
Working with such a universal problem also helped us gain many insights through conversations with peers throughout the semester. The direct upload from social media feature is one of the many ideas sparked from these informal research sessions.
As the visual design lead, I also deepened my UI design skills. Quickly designing high-fidelity prototype screens under pressure taught me to prioritize simplicity, consistency, and team feedback.
Delivery & Final Prototype
We presented MyMeals to our NYU UX Design class and created a detailed website documenting our process, accessible here:
Food Photo Credits:
Special thanks to one of our interview participants Karina (@karinassimpleeats), for her valuable insights and for allowing our team to use her beautiful food photos for our final prototype.
