Introducing MealKik
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Planning and cooking great meals can be a chore, whether it’s for myself or my family. I just don’t have the skills, time or motivation to do a good job at it. But I enjoy a nice home-cooked meal at the end of the day.
I need help.
I just want a simple way to get a home-cooked meal without all of the stress. I can’t afford a personal chef or a personal assistant. Take-out gets boring quick. As for time… I don’t even have time to organize a bowl of cereal for breakfast. Which cereal to choose? 2% or whole milk? Add fresh fruits or nuts? Big bowl or small bowl? Cold or hot cereal? Spoon or fork?
So it dawned on me: just like Batman needs Robin and Han Solo needs Chewbacca, I need a sidekick.
As we all know, the side-kick does all the hard work, but the hero gets the credit. From a hero-standpoint that sounds like a good deal. I don’t mind taking the credit and I can follow step-by-step cooking instructions.
MealKik
So I designed MealKik — the meal-planning-shopping-making sidekick I never knew I needed. It’s a modern app, so I dropped the “c” from “kick”. That’s how you can tell it’s hip and modern, and your friends will admire and secretly envy you from having downloaded the app first.
The road from zero to hero
The initial design challenge was to design an at-a-glance dashboard-like app that would help people navigate information overload. How do we get to a meal sidekick app from there?
As with any great design story, we took twists and turns, adapting along the way. The initial target user research looked at how a variety of people managed information, from busy students to home-makers (that’s housewife in old-school speak - but we’re modern, remember?) to retirees. It became apparent that everyone had busy lives, and making time for meal planning was not a priority.
So if you can’t make time, then you have to make the meal planning-shopping-making as easy as possible.
Design background: focus on healthy eating
Lots of web-sites help with healthy habits, but none provide any help with finding healthy ingredients locally. That would be the focus: affordable, healthy and locally sourced.
The key idea and requirement for the meal app was to make everything really easy for the user, asking only for a small number of decisions: main ingredient, what kind of dish, and what style of cooking. The app would provide healthy recipe recommendations based on that.
Once you decide on a recipe we can create a shopping list and display the recipe instructions from the web. If it’s easy enough to use, I might even download and pay for my own app from the app store.
Design iteration 1: paper storyboards and prototyping
The first step was to build a storyboard to try to frame the overall experience. Paper and pen was plenty good enough here to experiment with different ideas and flows.
Similarly, the user interface itself was easiest to experiement with using paper and pen:
Design iteration 2: first main screen wireframe
Having gone through a few reams of paper, I could do the first electronic home-screen mock-up which captured the main interface elements.
Design iteration 3: create a partially-functioning GUI mock-up.
From there the step to an online prototype was pretty easy, but I got a little color-crazy:
I submitted this one to a couple of rounds of user testing, both in-person and online. Users clicked through non-working visual prototypes, giving feedback on what they thought was easy, confusing, difficult and great.
Design Iteration 4: listen to testing feedback and improve.
With so much concise feedback I was able to refine the app, simplify the interface and make it a bit easier on the eyes. This is what the final non-working prototype looks like:
I’m thinking of removing the “c” from “chicken” to make it even more modern. What do you think?
The meal planning workflows have been worked out too:
Today
At this point the app and the various workflows have been designed and user-tested to the point that actual implementation can start.
MealKik takes most of the work out of organizing the meal planning, shopping and cooking. It’s all there on your phone, so you can do the planning work on the bus or subway, stop by the store with the auto-created grocery list and pull up the cooking instructions when you get home.
Stay tuned for more news on MealKik