This page is a work in progress. Check out the Google Slide Deck in the mean time.
Problem Statement
Meal planning presents several challenges that can deter individuals from maintaining a healthy and enjoyable diet. These challenges include navigating dietary restrictions, setting and adhering to dietary goals, a lack of cooking experience, time constraints, and often just not knowing what to cook. These obstacles can lead to inconsistent meal planning, which may negatively impact overall health. Our project aims to deeply understand the motivations behind why people engage in cooking or meal prepping and the dietary goals they set for themselves. Additionally, we seek to explore strategies that could help users remain consistent with their meal planning efforts. By focusing on these objectives, we aim to identify the core issues and needs that any potential solutions should address.
The search for a problem...
Our group began by giving our problem a sense of direction.
When we started to think about what actually makes meal planning difficult, we were overwhelmed with all the many reasons.
To help narrow down those reasons, we put together a quick proto-style journey map. This helped identify pain points.
Research Plan
We conducted 5 user interviews. It was important that our interview plan included 4 key takeaways:
What does a great meal feel like?
What values affect their food choices?
Do they value speed or quality?
Are they planning in bulk or limited quantity?
But while interviewing, we also wanted to learn more about who our users were.
We asked our participants to tell us:
a little bit about themselves
their relationship with technology
their relationship with meal prepping/planning
what they hold important when it comes to meal planning
how much planning/cooking they actually do
what their actual meal goals were.
Survey Data
We optimized Google forms to create a user pain point survey.
The responses to our survey revealed a glimpse of user habits as well as many pain points that were were not expecting.
At first, our survey asked very general questions like, “How many meals do you plan for?” or “Have you ever planned more than one meal in advance?”
33.3% said two meals
94.4% said yes