Preppy | a tool to meal plan, share and connect
Integrating easy shift view and meal planning to make a simpler user process
Prompt: Taking care of one’s health
Project type: End to end, prototype + user testing
Role: UX design student, sole UX designer
Duration: Q4 2024- Q1 2025
Tools: Figma, Miro, Mural, Maze, Otter Ai
The Business Goal
The user will be able to schedule more efficiently their meal planning and be more
productive and have a way to be able to view their work schedule and home meal planning at once. By providing a solution that will allow better work-life balance, the goal is to increase retention of using this product by making this a daily necessity and increase engagement.
The Users
I focused on the healthcare workers, such as nurses, doctors, therapists that have shift work.
Work hours: 12 hours shifts/3x week
Ages: 23-45 years old
Hypothesis: Healthcare workers can have inflexible and sometimes unpredictable work schedules, which can make it hard to balance personal and friend & family time.
“Work-life balance is having a good mix of work load and what makes you happy outside of work.”
Keith Finley
“It makes me happy to have at least 2 days off, I am more productive.”
Monet Goode
“After my third shift, I am so exhausted I do not have energy to do anything productive on my days off.”
Channing Lee
STATS from Affinity Mapping from user interviews
The Research
Goal: To understand the everyday lives of healthcare workers in and out of work setting.
Research Methods: Interview and Surveys
Main questions:
How their scheduling works, and typical requirements?
What their day offs are like?
What work-life balance means to them?
Research Findings
Common Pain Points
Scheduling is inflexible due to staffing needs, and requirements.
Viewing their schedule on a monthly view calendar has made keeping track of their shifts easier.
Their long stretch of shifts causes exhaustion that makes their days off harder to obtain work-life balance
Key findings
The responses from the users were further supporting my hypothesis and have given me more of an idea for an area to find a solution for these particular users. The unpredictable natural of shifts healthcare workers have, negative affect their quality of work-life balance.
The value the quickness and ease when viewing their schedules on their phones. They rely on this particular calendar view for keeping track of their shift and also their events on their day off.
Define
Brainstorming from the POV/HMW statements helped construct a solution.
Card sorting, priority features list, task flow, user flows, persona, story boarding and building a site map was when I began to idealize who I was making solutions for and what exactly would be included.
Overall Thoughts
I found that the define stage was a very important part of figuring out what this product would be solving for. I struggled to find focus during this stage because there were so many ideas and inspiration from my research and competitor analysis to sort through. I found that being able to list out my priority features and referencing back to my business goal was helpful in guiding me to focus on the needed things to make my solution to help healthcare workers increase their productivity and balance their work-life.
User Persona
Priority Features List
Site Map
User Flow for Full Meal Planning
Making my low fidelty wireframes
Taking my features list and my inspiration from my competitor analysis and design pattern research, I wanted to sketch simple designs that incorporate all the needed information in the separate screens.
NurseGrid is one of the main applications my users mentioned and used during my interviews. I found that the style of the calendar and the simple design was very effective and I wanted to use that in my designs for my calendar page.
Design
Branding
The brand needed colors that embodied warmth, authenticity, community, approachability and inspiration. Many of my user interviews gave insight on how they need more motivation to do active things on their days off. Creating a feeling of ease and simplicity was needed to help the user feel relaxed and supported.
Putting together brand colors and typography into my mid-fidelty wireframes
At this stage, I enjoyed the process of putting my brand colors on the designs. It was fun to see how everything looked with the added color and shades.
The next steps was to make the complete screens to go along my user flows to create my prototypes.
Testing the prototype
Conducted usability testing on 10 people who work in healthcare and also those who cook and meal plan. (1-1 monitored via zoom and also self-testing through Maze)
After evaluating all the user feedback
Most of the feedback was to somehow make the icons more recognizable. I also found that the added steps to find the meal plan page and then to find the meal was something I can reduce to lessen the time spent doing this task. On average each task took 90 secs. My goal for future tests would be to get it down to 10-30 seconds.
The users all had a common point of misclicks and confusion
I had asked users to select the meal described in prompt and to add the meal to the meal plan. I then asked to find the Meal Plan page to schedule their meal for the date given in prompt.
The most common misclicks during the user testing is indicated here as the red circles. The green indicates the correct pathway. 9/10 users was able to eventually click onto the correct path to completion. I found that it was not clear what icon was the “meal plan page”. The users associated the calendar icon as the place to schedule their meal.
I made iterations that were priority using my feedback analysis
With these iterations, I was able to remove the steps to find meal plan page into a shorter flow by adding a Schedule Meal button that will go directly to the calendar to put in their date and time for their meal plan.
Conclusion
Was I able to accomplish my goal?
I believe in the end, my product accomplished its goal in creating a simple solution that healthcare workers can use to meal plan and also be on track with their busy work schedules. This product will allow for better productivity on their days off and hopefully creates more time for other activity in their day.
What were my struggles with this project?
Limited time for research, and delayed responses.
Creating a user testing environment that was standardized for all users was difficult.
Using the platform Maze was not ideal for my user testing.
Maze didn’t allow users to go back or restart.
Some users had done the test self proctored. The limited data and narration during the screen recordings did not provide insight from users
What did I learn?
Focusing on priority items. I struggled focusing what was needed to be designed in the beginning. But making list and putting things in priority helped. To stay on track I found that going back to the main goal of the project helped me put my focus back to what needed to be done.
Reaching out to the UX community. I felt kind of isolated from the UX community at times because the whole online course aspect of things. But eventually I reached out more and got more comfortable for asking for help from the Design Lab fellow cohorts. It was very helpful to get peer feedback and from UX design students that knows the terminology and putting things in the UX perspective.
What are the next steps that would futher improve this project?
I think this project has a lot of potential to become even more than just a tool to meal plan and keep track of work shifts. I would love to dive deeper in research and designing the community aspect of this product. I believe that community and support is key for having a common sense of belonging within healthcare. As a nurse currently, it makes work 100% better when you know you have your trusted work buddies at your side and to know that they’re there for you outside of work as well. I would like to see this project become a place for healthcare workers to share their meals and to interact with one another in a different setting other than work.