Meal Planning App

Overview

Walmart's weekly flyer drives significant traffic, but that attention rarely translates into structured purchasing decisions. Customers wanted to eat better and more intentionally, but the research made clear that the real blockers were time and inspiration, not budget or cooking ability. The opportunity was to connect deal discovery to meal execution in a way that fit into how customers already shopped.

Solution

A mobile app designed to simplify weekly meal planning by surfacing relevant Walmart flyer deals as the starting point for building a meal plan. Customers could personalise their experience with dietary preferences and family restrictions, then place a Walmart.ca grocery order directly from within the app.

Process

01 / Understand & Research

Secondary research, customer intercepts, and focus groups revealed that time and lack of inspiration were the core barriers, not taste preferences or cooking equipment as initially hypothesised. That reframe was important. It shifted the solution space away from recipe content and toward reducing the planning overhead entirely.

02 / Ideation

Cross-functional workshops brought together Strategy, Design, DevOps, and Product Management to generate and pressure-test concepts. Several directions were explored and ruled out. A cookbook format solved inspiration but not time. A meal kit box added cost that contradicted Walmart's value positioning. A physical device and live streaming format both introduced too much complexity for the validated problem. A mobile app tied directly to the weekly flyer addressed time, inspiration, and Walmart's existing customer touchpoints simultaneously.

03 / Prototype & Test

Prototyping moved incrementally from low-fidelity wireframes to a high-fidelity interactive build. Card sorting was used throughout user testing to continuously pressure-test our assumptions about information architecture and feature prioritisation. The final prototype earned executive sign-off and approval to enter development.

04 / Development

MVP scope was defined in collaboration with Strategy and DevOps, then handed off to an external development team based in the UK. Full dev documentation and a prioritised user flow were produced to ensure alignment across time zones and reduce ambiguity during implementation.

Outcome

The initiative was paused due to shifting company priorities after I transitioned out of the team.

• Received executive approval and entered early development
• Delivered complete designs and dev documentation ready for future implementation
• Validated the problem space sufficiently to inform Walmart's continued investment in product innovation in this category