I’m a die-hard foodie and home chef, so naturally I belong to quite a few foodie groups on Facebook. I decided to make my theoretical app do something that I’m passionate about: recipes and meal planning. I posed this question in four separate groups to see what my fellow home chefs would want in a mobile app for meal planning.
Question: If you were looking for a specific app that helped you with meal planning and shopping, what kind of features would you want?
Tori Jones If you mean an app to create. Something where you could type your ingredients you have and see what kind of meal you could make.
Ruth Royer Something that incorporated info about sales at grocery stores — I use the flyers to determine our meals for the week
Angela Cox Edge Conversions of servings & reviews! Good luck 👍
Diane Wetherbee I use Plan to Eat, and it has just about everything I want. Easy way to clip recipes. Works well while using the recipe, showing step by step instructions and keeping the screen on. Ability to drag and drop recipes to the planning calendar so you can plan what meals you'll cook that week. Automatically creates a shopping list from those recipes. You can have friends whose recipes you can see, so you can swap recipes between you. And once a year around Christmas, they have a half off sale, so it's pretty inexpensive.
Pearl Meredith Beavers I'd want to be able to enter ingredients like "chicken, kidney beans, or green beans", and get meal ideas. Then I'd like to be able to do that for several meals and then print a shopping list, separated by department, dairy with dairy, canned with canned. Lastly, when shopping for meals, I'd like to know approximate servings, calories, and total salt and sugar content. Sorry, but you asked!
Dakota Chidester Quick and easy recipes organized by category, with the grocery list already made and able to be easily added your overall grocery list.
Wanda Taylor Wachowski Made suggestions for meals from local sales.
Laura Teague A plan where you could add choices your family loves that you enjoy to make that distribute randomly over a period of time so that you aren’t faced with a meal plan that contains meals that you would never cook or shop for.
Neal Ramon Shopping lists for each pre-planned meal with local price comparison and buget and or dietary restriction friendly substitution options.
Jordan Goldstrich I would love one that did a recipe list and then somehow linked to local grocery stores to show the cheapest place to get the ingredients that week. Like if zucchini was on sale at sprouts and in the recipe, it would let me know to buy it at sprouts that week.
Margaret Alvis A recipe finder where you could input ingredients you already have on hand & it would search the web for you and suggest recipes that utilize those ingredients.
For example, you could input “chicken, beans” and it might suggest a green chicken chili, chicken enchiladas with rice and beans, or an Italian chicken and white bean stew.
Often times meal planning begins with me making a list of what I’ve already got on hand and what I need to use up!
Lori Kearns Cates I would like to be able to enter the ingredients I have on hand and have it suggest meals based on my style of eating.
Jenniferlynn Counts Garcetti I’d like to be able to insert food allergies, & select dietary restrictions such as keto, gluten free, vegetarian, paleo, dairy free.
I noticed that a lot of people were asking for the same kind of features, so I went about making a hand-written list of every requested feature to highlight which requests were repeatedly asked for.
Based on this list, I took some index cards to organize the user feature requests.
This method helped me organize the requests a little better and visualize which categories to begin separating them into.
For this small sample group, I found twenty-three separate feature requests and put them into seven different piles.
The most frequently requested features that I noticed were users wanting the application to make recipe suggestions based off of local grocery ads and/or based off of what they already had on hand in their pantry/fridge. Other requests were categorized together according to their function, such as recipe functions, user-to-user interaction, and dietary restrictions (diets, allergies, etc.)
This helped me begin my wireframes for the application. First, some hand-drawn user flow wireframes using index cards, and then high fidelity wireframes using Adobe XD.
I also did some research on some of the most downloaded mobile applications for meal planning as well as various large supermarkets to see how they laid out their designs for users.
What did all of the popular grocery shopping apps have in common? As a user, I don’t think I realized how similar all of their structures were until I took a closer look. Most major grocery stores are using the same layout: simplistic, side-scroll with pictures and buttons underneath for quantity selection. There’s a favorites list for items that the user has purchased before to streamline the process and ensure return customers.
I then took a look at various meal-planning applications to observe how they worked before contemplating how I would combine both types of applications into one.
Some of the apps began with establishing a user profile, asking questions about stores most frequently used, the user’s dietary restrictions and allergies, foods that the user wasn’t particularly fond of (yes, there are people out there that actually dislike tomatoes). A few of the applications take the user directly to the home page with bright colors, easy-to-read fonts, and large thumbnails to draw you directly into featured recipes. Making a favorites list is a top priority in pretty much all of the meal-planning apps. Half of what I explored had the calendar feature. Every single one included nutritional facts and calories. One feature I personally liked on the app “Meal Lime” was a cookware list with each recipe. I feel like this would be an especially useful feature for novice home cooks and people who don’t spend as much time in the kitchen as I do.
Another issue that I have heard from many home cooks in roundtable discussions is time. Most people want simple, quick recipes with easily acquired ingredients. While I will jump at the opportunity to make hand-made lobster and truffle ravioli, I don’t always have the time or the means to make exotic dishes like this. Most people that I talk with are also in the same situation.
I see a lot of features in meal-planning applications that at least state the approximate preparation and cooking time, but I began to think that if I were to personally create an app for home cooks that would “sell,” I would only feature recipes that took thirty minutes or less. The more people I spoke with personally about their home cooking needs, the more I heard that 30 minutes was the maximum time that they were willing to spend on a weeknight to cook dinner.
According to my own personal research, along with countless other articles, I found that home cooks want streamlined meal planning and shopping due to busy work schedules and family life. Most people don’t have the time for elaborate dinners with exotic ingredients. I further realized that an application that worked directly with features like Postmates, Wal-Mart Grocery Pick-Up, and Instacart would be wildly successful.
An app that helps you not only create an efficient meal plan calendar, but solely offers quick recipes and the ability to find the best prices for ingredients that can be delivered straight to your door? Sign me up!
After I developed several versions of wireframes for the app based on all of this information, I decided to go ahead and create some sample designs and follow up with these Facebook groups to see what they thought about the layout.
Chad Thompson What about adding a check box next to each ingredient in a particular recipe with the ability to export it directly to the shopping list?
Lori Kearns Cates Would the menus hyperlink back to the recipes? Also, I like how the shopping app I use now allows me to choose a category for each item that matches up to the way most grocery stores are arranged.
Kasandra Bell Carey, The layouts are nice. There are similar products already though. I would love to see gluten free, dairy free, egg free, coconut free, Allergan free recipes since that's how I have to cook. I realize that's a small niche market. I also know that you have a gift for creating awesome food! I'm an ok cook but don't have time or interest in trying new recipes. That would be a huge benefit for me.
I do like the shopping list and grocery store search.
Carey Petersen Ah yes, I forgot to add that in! As part of my initial research, I got several requests for features that were allergen-friendly.
I know that there are similar apps to this one, it was more of a project to illustrate that I can go all the way from research phase to high fidelity wireframes and a functioning prototype.
Kasandra Bell Yes, you did that quite well!
MaryKate Clark So, I'm trying to figure out how it works aside from adding meals to a calendar and searching for ingredients.
If you pick a meal/recipe, does it add all the ingredients to a shopping list for you, or do you have to add them yourself?
Carey Petersen It will automatically generate a grocery list from the recipes you add. From there, it will then tell you where to shop, based on where 5+ items are found cheaper... or you can have your groceries delivered. Guess I should add something to denote that.
MaryKate Clark That's useful!
MaryKate Clark Also, the layout seemed functional, hard to tell what some pages connected to, but the options all seemed pretty clear.
Carey Petersen The buttons are linked to the corresponding pages, so you can actually move within the app, but it does makes more sense if you see the flow chart, I'll admit.
From the feedback that I received, I changed a few things. I added a page that preceded the home page to collect user data, such as food allergies and dietary preferences, excluding recipes that contained aforementioned ingredients. I also added categories to the grocery shopping list to better organize the user experience.
From my second round of edits, I went ahead and designed some of the pages for fun just to wrap up the project. These are the rough drafts...
I decided to refine the designs to give the application a more sleek look and finished out the interface, referencing the high-fidelity wireframes that I had created.
Click here to see the final working prototype.
