Client:
Instacart
(General Assembly class project)
The Challenge:
Instacart interviewed its users regarding their eating habits. Users cited a lack of time due to work and family commitments as the main reasons for reducing the number of home cooked meals they make. Users also felt they planned poorly when purchasing food at stores and supermarkets—many choices were made on the fly. As a result they often stated that they threw out spoiled food that wasn’t eaten in time.
The users wanted to find ways to plan meals more efficiently, to get inspiration for meals, to be able to purchase only the food they need for their selected meals.
The Solution:
Instarecipe, a concept for a sister site for Instacart. Created a clickable prototype that would allow users to easily find recipes based on a variety of preferences like dietary restrictions and cuisine types. It would also allow them to import all the ingredients necessary to make those recipes into their Instacart checkout so that they can buy only what they need without wasting food or money.
My Process:
User persona:
My Approach
I started my process by doing extensive market analysis on both Instacart and their competitors. This gave me a clearer idea of what was being offered by food delivery services and the areas of improvement that they had, more on these later. I also researched services that delivered meal plan ingredients. I also tried to get an idea of what these services were not able to offer.
After I had a general idea of the state of the market in terms of services and features they offered, I conducted user interviews with several candidates that all live in areas where both grocery delivery and meal plan delivery was available. I inquired about how their interactions with these services was like, what their expectations for these services were, and what needs weren’t being met. This gave me a better understanding of the users and how they would prefer that these delivery services worked.
The Opportunities:
From all the research and interviews i conducted i deduced a few key pain points that show me where the opportunities lie for this product.
Users said that they wanted something that would save them time. They did not want to have to go into the grocery stores to pick up the groceries. They did not want something with complicated navigation. They wanted to have more diverse selections in the type of meals they could order. They wanted to have options for ethnic recipes. They did not want all the recipe choices to be over simplistic, it took away from the fun and challenge of cooking. Lastly, they wanted to have options for allergy safe recipes.
This last pain point was of particular interest to me because, in all the market analysis that I did, I did not find a single grocery or meal delivery service that could offer allergy safe options for their customers. More on this later.
Solution:
Instarecipe was conceived to work in conjunction with its sister site Instacart.
Instarecipe would facilitate the ordering of all the ingredients necessary to make recipes and add them directly to your Instacart shopping list.
