Lifestyle friendly meal kits
Project Overview
Challenge
My friend was complaining how meal kit services don’t offer a flexible enough range of options for vegans. She’s been vegan for a while, and while she’s used to cooking for herself, she now lives with her boyfriend who isn’t vegan. She thought it would be nice if there was a meal kit service that could support each of their habits. Maybe some nights her boyfriend would eat vegan, but other nights, they would be able to cook similar meals with easy add-on animal protein options.
Solution
As someone who has lived with food intolerances and specific nutritional needs, I understand the frustration of wanting to be able to just make a quick and easy meal after a long day. Using my friend as an example, I imagined what HelloFresh would be like if they expanded into a “HelloVegan” line. It would be vegan-first, focused on sustainability and the environment, but flexible enough for meat add-ons for those who follow a flex-diet or for live with non-vegans.
This was a fun side project to explore new design techniques while coming up with solutions for problems I care about.
Process
Market Research
While I knew this was a problem for my friend and her boyfriend, I wanted to make sure I understood the wider audience. My solution should be something that works for everyone: strict vegans, "flexitarians," or health-conscious eaters. The key to this app was going to be flexibility. With that in mind, I turned to published studies, articles on cities with thriving vegan restaurants, and opinion boards like Reddit.
From here, I learned that to reach a wider audience, the environmental factor had to be just as, if not more, important than the health factor. It's a misconception that vegans only want to eat healthy all the time — they want comfort food too! Restaurants found an even split between customers ordering their fried, greasy vegan meals and their healthy salads. Only about 40% of vegans said they were following this diet for health purposes.
User Personas & Research
With the background knowledge I now had, I distinguished three main persona groups I would be targeting:
Sara, a young mom, is primarily concerned with balanced, nutritious, and creative meals. She needs preparation to be easy and wants continued education on how to raise a vegan family and maintain veganism outside the home kitchen.
James is a young adult who finds cooking daunting and expensive. He's focused on leading a sustainable lifestyle but doesn't want to sacrifice sharing meals with his roommates.
Lex, the most experienced cook of our personas, needs a supplementary meal kit option for her busy nights. She doesn't want to sacrifice cultural diversity in her meals, wants to eliminate as much food waste as possible, and wants to see the brand match her vegan values.
I explored Synthetic Users to collect some preliminary data around what each of these personas would look for. While very cool, I wouldn't use this as a replacement for user research or testing, but instead, it could be used in the early brainstorming phase as a way to see new perspectives and think through various features.
Pushing my Designs
I wanted to try out a few new design techniques and push myself for this project. I created a spinning lemon for the loading state, played with bright colors and background textures, and experimented with AI to generate a set of images that fit the brand. I also incorporated illustrated digital artwork, using a free vector set as a base and manipulating the designs to fit the brand and the goal of the project.
One of the app features I really wanted to think creatively about was the environmental component. Drawing from my cognitive science background, I knew it was important that users had intrinsic pride and received positive reinforcement while using this app. They had to feel that by buying this meal kit, they were truly making an impact. This would help increase brand loyalty and keep the users engaged.
To achieve this, I created an entire section dedicated to allowing users to see their direct impact. This section would pull statistics the company could track on each user's food waste, water, CO2, and energy saved. An element of gamification was included as well; as users increase their statistics, the visual landscapes within the app will become "cleaner." They can have fun observing wildlife returning to scenes, watching flowers bloom, and seeing water become clearer.
Not only will users have delicious, flexible meals to choose from, but they can also track their real impact and challenge others to match it by sharing their stat cards on social media.
GAllery
