Walmart, Meal Planner
Problem
Our customers crave more variety in their diet while also wanting to be healthy, however, they struggle to do so because of a lack of time and a tight budget.
How might we help them achieve their nutritional goals without breaking the bank?
Solution
An end-to-end app was designed to help our time-sensitive and financially-stretched customers. The app allows users to plan their meals in advance, create a shopping list and cart, and even place an order with Walmart.ca. It syncs with Walmart's weekly flyer to provide healthy recipes on sale and allows users to define food restrictions and preferences for their families, creating a highly customized experience.
Results
The innovative meal-planning app has received buy-in from executive-level stakeholders and is currently in development. It's set to be a game-changer for anyone looking to eat healthy and save money, providing users with everything they need to make healthy eating both convenient and affordable.
01
Understand & Research
Early Analysis
What we know (from research conducted by our Strategy team):
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, conducted by our strategy team.
Customer intercepts, in downtown Toronto
Focus groups, with recruited users
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 through focus groups and 1:1 interviews, we were able to define the following goal and challenges of 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
User Persona: Brenda, 38, Teacher
Brenda is a mother of a young kid who’s a picky eater, a wife, and a caregiver to her elderly mother with diabetes who lives with them. Her husband has high cholesterol, so she needs to make sure their meals are healthy and nutritious. She is also stretched on time due to her job and she’s on a tight budget so she shops at Walmart to save money on groceries.
Brenda enjoys cooking and experimenting with new recipes but often finds it challenging to find meals that satisfy everyone's tastes and dietary restrictions.
02
Ideation
We conducted a variety of workshops and brainstorming sessions to come up with as many solutions as possible.
The two most notable ones were:
Jobs-to-be-done session
Ideation workshop with Crazy 8
Constraint:
The solution needs to be either a web or mobile app
Discarded Ideas:
Cookbook, physical device, live streaming platform, meal planner box.
Early Designs
Our goal was to gather data as quickly as possible and gauge customer sentiment toward the solution.
I created a very rough, early wireframe of what the app could look like and we put it in front of a small subset of users.
We were following 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
The initial rounds of testing went really well and we kept gathering insights on what the users were expecting from this platform (through exercises such as Card Sorting) as well as on more generic everyday struggles that they’re facing.
Eventually, this process led us to develop a high-fidelity version of the app that we presented to executive-level stakeholders within Walmart and got 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, D&V, and DevOps teams to create a user flow for MVP 1.0 of Meal Planner.
Where is Meal Planner?
The app is still being developed. I’m currently working extensively with devs to not only make sure that what’s being built is a correct representation of the product but also to assist them with any additional designs they might need (think error messages, loading screens, etc.)
I understand that you might have some questions after reading this case study as some details have been omitted for the sake of readability. If you’d like to learn more about the project please feel free to get in touch!