Walmart, Meal Planner
Role
Lead Designer
Key Contributions
Strategy, Research, Design
Key Partners
Strategy Team, PM, Developers, Executives, Health Innovation
Our customers want healthier and more varied meals, yet tight schedules and limited budgets force them into repetitive eating habits and lower-quality food choices.
How might we help them reach their nutritional goals in a way that fits both their time and their budget?
Solution
A mobile app was designed to help our customers with meal planning, leveraging the weekly flyer deals and allowing them to place an order on Walmart.ca, while offering a customized experience through the addition of food restrictions and preferences for the family.
Impact
Disclaimer: The initiative was paused due to shifting company priorities after I had transitioned out of the team.
Received executive approval and entered early development.
Delivered end-to-end designs along with dev documentation for future implementation.
Gathered enough validation in this problem space for the company to pursue innovative projects.
Created repeatable frameworks to come up with solutions.
Contributed to a data-bank of market and user research for the company to leverage in the future.
01
Understand & Research
Early Analysis
What we know:
There are opportunities and emerging trends in the Health & Wellness space, specifically as it relates to nutrition
People associate living better with eating healthier
What we don’t know:
How do people plan their nutrition?
What challenges are people facing when it comes to being healthier?
Assumptions:
People don’t have the time to eat healthy
People think that eating healthy is expensive
People associate healthy food with poor taste
People don’t have the equipment to cook certain recipes
Initial Research
Research Methods:
Secondary research
Customer intercepts
Focus groups
1:1s
Learnings
People do associate healthy food with a higher cost
People would like to meal plan but struggle because of a lack of inspiration and time
People do not typically associate healthy meals with poor taste
People do not see equipment as a blocker in their meal planning process
Uncovering the User
After talking to a large number of people, we were able to define the following goal and challenges for our customers:
Goals:
Save time and money on meal planning
Find healthy and nutritious recipes for the family
Get new recipe ideas that everyone in the family will enjoy
Find recipes that are easy to make and don't require too much prep work
Challenges:
Limited time due to job and family responsibilities
Limited budget for groceries
Finding recipes that meet everyone's dietary restrictions and preferences
Keeping meals interesting and varied
Additionally, I took the initiative to create documentation such as personas and user journey maps to keep the team grounded ahead of ideation.
02
Ideation
I facilitated a variety of workshops and brainstorming sessions to come up with as many solutions as possible, ensuring stakeholders from all key teams were included (Strategy, Design & Validation, DevOps, PMs).
The two most notable ones were:
Jobs-to-be-done session
Ideation workshop with Crazy 8
Discarded Ideas:
Cookbook, physical device, live streaming platform, meal planner box.
Early Designs
My goal was to gather data as quickly as possible and gauge customer sentiment toward the solution.
I created an early wireframe for the app and put it in front of a small subset of users.
This approach followed the Strategyzer framework for testing ideas which consisted in increasing fidelity and investment as the amount of confidence in the solution increased.
Scope of Work
The scope of the project was to provide time-sensitive and financially-stretched mothers with an app that can help them plan and shop for their families’ meals more conveniently, from both a time and money standpoint.
The product had to meet the following requirements:
Easy and intuitive to use
Must be synced with the Walmart weekly flyer
Needs to provide a variety of recipes categorized based on real family needs (e.g. fussy kids)
Must provide the ability to add family members’ profiles with their dietary restrictions and preferences
Needs to give users the ability to plan and schedule meals in advance that can be shared with their family
Must allow users to shop for the recipes they saved directly through walmart.ca
03
Prototyping & Testing
During the initial rounds of user testing I used exercises like Card Sorting to continuously gather insights on what the users were expecting from this platform as well as on more generic everyday struggles that they’re facing.
Eventually, this process led me to developing a high-fidelity version of the app that my team and I presented to executive-level stakeholders within Walmart, gathering positive feedback and the green light to start development.
04
Development
To build the app, we partnered with an external dev team located in the UK. The main challenge at this point was to figure out how many of the initially planned features we could implement in the first iteration, given the time and budget constraints.
I worked with Strategy, Design & Validation, and DevOps teams to create a user flow for the MVP of Meal Planner.
Where is Meal Planner?
The app was still being developed when I left Walmart. At that time, I was working closely with developers to launch an MVP.
However, due to shifting priorities, the project was paused shortly after my departure, but many of the artifacts produced by me and my team have been instrumental to the business in the pursuit of other innovative ideas.
Some details have been omitted from the case study for the sake of readability.
If you’d like to learn more about the project feel free to get in touch!