Creating Empathy Maps for a Meal Planning App (Amiyaa) — UX Showdown Mission-III

Naseeb PK
5 min readJun 13, 2023

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Do you know about Chapterr by Gethired? It is the ultimate community for designers who want to level up their game and become “Superpowered Designers” — the full-stack dynamos who can make a real impact in today’s digital world. It has challenges named “UX Showdown” to improve skills as a UX designer and this is the third mission of UX Showdown.

The Scenario

As a UX designer at AMIYAA (https://www.amiyaa.com/), in this meal planning app job, your task is to create empathy maps for different user types. Understand their attitudes, behaviors, and needs to enhance their experience.

Task

Choose a user type like a busy parent, college student, or fitness enthusiast. Research their preferences, challenges, and motivations. Create empathy maps, visualizing their thoughts, feelings, actions, and pain points in our app.

What is Amiyaa?

Amiyaa is an Indian meal planner app designed to simplify and enhance the culinary experience for individuals seeking to embrace the vibrant flavours and diversity of Indian cuisine. With an extensive collection of traditional and contemporary recipes spanning various regional cuisines, Amiyaa offers users the opportunity to explore and create authentic Indian dishes tailored to their dietary preferences and restrictions.

The app provides personalized meal plans, grocery lists, and step-by-step instructions, empowering users to effortlessly plan, prepare, and savour delicious and healthy Indian meals at home.

Objective

The objective of creating an empathy map is to develop a deeper understanding of the users’ thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and needs. By putting yourself in the shoes of the users and gaining empathy, you can gather valuable insights that help you design a meal-planning app that truly resonates with their preferences and challenges.

The empathy map allows you to consider various aspects such as what the users think and feel, what they see, what they say and do, and what they hear.

Methodology

  1. Define the User Group: Identify the specific user group or persona you want to focus on for your empathy map. Determine their characteristics, goals, and challenges related to meal planning.
  2. Gather User Research & Developing Empathy maps: Conduct user research using methodologies such as interviews, observations, surveys, or user testing. Collect qualitative and quantitative data about the users’ experiences, thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and needs related to meal planning. Develop empathy maps using these data.
  3. Analyze and Synthesize: Review the completed empathy map and extract key takeaways. Look for actionable insights that can inform the design and development to improve app features.

User Persona

User Type 1: Fitness Enthusiast

Interests

  • Staying fit and leading a healthy lifestyle.
  • Trying out new recipes and experimenting with nutritious ingredients.
  • Engaging in various physical activities and workouts.

Needs and expectations

  • Access to a diverse collection of healthy and balanced recipes.
  • Customizable meal plans that align with her dietary preferences
  • Nutritional information and calorie tracking to ensure her meals support her fitness regimen.

Goals

  • Maintain a well-balanced diet
  • Find meal-planning solutions that make it easier to adhere to nutritional requirements.
  • Save time by efficiently planning meals

Pain points and frustrations

  • Limited time for meal planning
  • Difficulty finding recipes that align with her specific dietary needs
  • Lack of organization and structure in her current meal planning process.

User Type 2: Fitness Enthusiast

Interests

  • Balancing a demanding work schedule and personal life.
  • Incorporating healthy eating habits into his busy routine.

Needs and expectations

  • Simple and time-efficient meal-planning solutions
  • Quick and easy-to-follow recipes
  • Customizable meal plans that can adapt to his dietary preferences

Goals

  • To make healthier food choices despite time constraints
  • To improve his overall well-being and energy levels through balanced meals.
  • To reduce reliance on unhealthy takeout or convenience foods.

Pain points and frustrations

  • Limited time for meal preparation and planning
  • Difficulty finding simple and nutritious recipes that fit into his busy lifestyle.
  • Lack of variety and boredom with his current meal choices.

Empathy Map

User Type 1: Fitness Enthusiast

User Type 2: Busy Professional

Findings and Opportunities

  1. Simplify Grocery Shopping: Users seek convenience and efficiency in their meal planning process due to their busy fitness routines. Introducing features like automated meal plans based on fitness goals, customizable recipes, and streamlined grocery shopping integration help users to save time and effort.
  2. Enhance Personalization: Users are concerned about nutrition and want to ensure their meals support their fitness goals. By incorporating nutritional information and meal tracking features that display macronutrient breakdowns, calorie counts, and portion sizes, helps users make informed decisions about their meals.
  3. Provide Education: Users want to incorporate healthier eating habits into their busy routines but find it challenging. Providing educational resources, tips, and reminders to encourage healthier food choices and suggest alternatives to unhealthy takeout options help users to follow healthier eating habits.
  4. Integrate Social Sharing and Community Engagement: Enable users to share their meal plans, recipes, and progress with the community, fostering a sense of support and motivation.

By addressing these findings and opportunities, the existing app can better cater to the needs, preferences, and pain points of users, resulting in an improved user experience and increased user satisfaction.

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