Making meal prep more enjoyable for young adults
MyMeals is a meal planning app designed to make cooking more convenient, reduce food waste, and increase meal variety for busy young adults.
Created as a team project for NYU Steinhardt’s UX Design course, the app addresses the common pain points in meal preparation uncovered in our user research with features tailored to busy, health-conscious users.
Role: UX research and design
Tools: Figma, Miro, Maze
Team: 3 designers
Timeline: 14 weeks (January - May 2025)
UX Design
User Research
Course Project
Mobile
THE CHALLENGE
Meal planning is inconvenient and unenjoyable for busy young adults.
Cooking at home is healthier and more affordable than dining out, but finding recipes, making shopping lists, shopping, and cooking can be overwhelming, especially on top of school and/or work commitments.
Research
My team and I conducted interviews with 6 young adults to start breaking down our large problem space. We learned how participants typically approach meals during the week - some were already comfortable with meal prep while others regularly used pickup & delivery apps.
Affinity Mapping - Key Insights
Time is the biggest constraint
Meal prepping saves time during busy weeks, but the meal prep process can take a lot of time itself.
Balancing simplicity and variety
Participants opted for familiar recipes, but they don’t want to eat the same foods multiple times.
Reducing food waste
Buying groceries for one creates leftover ingredients, which can be hard to use up.
Personas
With all of our insights from two rounds of interviews, and a user survey, we were surprised that all participants saw value in meal preparation, wanted to cook more, and had similar pain points, but not everyone liked to cook.
We identified two different motivations behind wanting to meal plan, which we developed into our two personas:
Sage
Intrinsically motivated to cook - views it as a hobby or creative practice.
Wants to experiment with new recipes and gain cooking skills
Frustrated when they don’t have the time to cook the meals they want
“It just feels good to make meals that are healthy and look nice. Cooking is a nice way for me to destress and have a creative space.”
— Interviewee quote aligned with Sage persona
Olive
Extrinsically motivated to cook - views it as a chore
Wants to eat healthier and save money by cooking their own meals
Frustrated when they forget to plan and end up having to eat out
“For me, it’s 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.”
— Interviewee quote aligned with Olive persona
Journey Map
We then mapped our two personas across five stages of meal prepping.
Design
As the lead UI designer, I led a workshop to collaborative on our visual aesthetic. We chose a rich color palette, a nostalgic accent font, and rounded component edges to give our designs a natural, fresh feel.
Vision Board
Selected Components
🥕
Select a Color:
Choose an Emoji
Produce:
cucumber (1 cup)
grape tomatos (1 cup)
red onion (¼ cup)
Search
⚡ ️Quick Meal
🥬 Vegetarian
💪 High Protein
Fish Tacos
Balsamic Steak Grain Bowl
Thai Quinoa Salad
Pizza Bites
Mediterranean Chicken and Rice Bowls
4 Servings
45 minutes
Match
Chicken Curry Rice Bowls
Ingredients:
4
cup
All-purpose flour
1
—
egg
1
tsp
Kosher salt
Add Ingredient
Make a Match
Choose from a variety of AI generated quick meals based on the current ingredients in your shopping list to minimize food waste.
Get Started
Spicy Chicken Tzatziki Pasta Salad
3 servings
25 minutes
3 New Ingredients: short pasta, red pepper flakes, lemon juice
5 Shared Ingredients: chicken, cucumber, feta cheese, grape tomatoes, tzatziki
Refresh
Add Match
Key Features
We iterated potential design solutions focusing on the first three stages of our journey map: inspiration, planning, and shopping.
Our final design incorporates three key features that work together to help all users find the perfect meals for their busy weeks.
Recipe Inspiration
Upload from Social Media
Quickly import recipes directly from your social media feed, helping you stay organized without stopping your scroll.
Why This Works:
Our users find recipes from a variety of sources, especially Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest.
Users were frustrated with recipes being scattered across various platforms, and often forgot to check individual apps when looking for recipe inspiration.
Reducing Food Waste
MyMeals & Make a Match
Organize your meals for the week by adding them to MyMeals where you can Make a Match to use up the leftover ingredients from your main meal in a new way.
Why This Works:
Our users often had leftover ingredients when cooking for only 1-2 people.
While all users wanted to use these up before they went bad, only 2 of the 6 participants normally had a plan for the ingredients at the time of shopping.
Users also wanted to have more variety in their meals without having to buy a lot more ingredients.
Efficiency & Organization
Shopping List
Ingredients from MyMeals are automatically added to the shopping list and organized by grocery store section for easy shopping.
Why This Works:
All of our interview participants reported using a list when grocery shopping.
One participant noted that including the ingredient amounts was incredibly helpful to them.
Outcomes
We conducted final usability testing with 20 users with Maze and resolved minor usability issues by improving navigation and button visibility.
50% (9 of 18) users said uploading recipes from social media was the most valuable feature.
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.
Next steps would include prompt engineering and further validation of the AI-generated meal matches.
Lessons Learned
01
Starting with a large problem space gave my team lots of possible directions, but using research to refine our focus early on made it easier to target specific user needs.
02
The universality of our problem space also allowed us to turn informal conversations with peers throughout the semester into research insights. The direct upload from social media feature came from workshopping our idea with a classmate.
03
As the visual design lead, I also deepened my UI design skills, especially through quickly refining high-fidelity screens live during team work sessions.
Final Design
My team presented MyMeals as our final project for our NYU Steinhardt UX Design class.
We also created a website documenting our process, which can be found at this link.
Food Photo Credits
Special thanks to one of our interview participants, Karina (@karinassimpleeats), for her valuable research insights and for allowing our team to use her food photos for our final prototype.