Dinner Made Easy App Prototype and UX Research
High Fidelity Designs for the Dinner Made Easy App
Project Overview
The Dinner Made Easy App was ground-up application that was developed for the modern-day family with working full-time parents who have difficulty providing healthy and balanced meals to their families. For any parent who has struggled with cooking for their family after a long day of work, we could understand that the problem was a difficult one. Based on personal interviews with working parents we discovered some may tend to purchase fast-food meals or serve a quick, unhealthy dishes, all of which can turn into an unhealthy pattern of eating. The Dinner Made Easy App was developed to assist busy parents with the cooking preparation of meals in an orderly, yet fun non-stressful manor.
In the initial stages of development, a base user flow structure was created with what we thought to be the essentials of the app. The initial user flow consisted of a new user login, submitting personal meal preferences, meal and recipe pages, a weekly meal plan page, and a monthly meal calendar. Although, through additional live user interviews and online workshop surveys, we were able to develop a much more user-friendly experience. Users asked for the app to be intuitive to their lives and schedule, noting to add such features as a personal grocery shopping list, special diets, submitting their own recipes, nutritional information, and allowing the app to suggest new recipes based off their personal meal preferences.
Dinner Made Easy logo
Through user feedback we were able to develop a much broader and robust user flow, with an intuitive approach that grows with the user and their family. Our team didn’t initially expect there to be so many suggestions as to how users wanted to interact with the app and make their meal planning easier. For example, one of the additional requests we heard often (and ultimately added to the final concept) was building in the option to order out from local restaurants based upon tense work schedules. While this option may have defeated the goal of a structured and healthy plan, it sounded like a reasonable yet much desired option that should be added.
Once the revamped user flow was in place our team developed live InVision trials for our users to test high fidelity wireframes to see how they were able to navigate through the app. There were a handful of small additional notes from users but at that point we felt we had a solid product that would supersede the needs of our working families.
One of the key ingredients to the success of this app was the personalization built into the app through options. Once our team considered what additional items should and could be developed into the baseline design, that is when the idea of the Dinner Made Easy app started to take shape. Personalization, intuitiveness, and empathy were the main elements that helped to shape this app for production, as well as create a stress-reducing tool for working adults.
