Empathy
As the Community Manager for Handpick, I was responsible for customer support emails, and noticed there was an overwhelming demand for meal solutions, wherein customers didn’t want to think of what to eat for dinner.
“After work, I don’t have much time to spend in grocery stores, and sometimes end up buying fast food, since I can’t be bothered to shop and cook on a weekday.”
“I don’t want to have to think about what’s for dinner… a no-brainer solution would be nice.”
“I want to learn how to cook, but with easy meals.”
DEFINE
SINGLE, WORKING PROFESSIONALS, AND FAMILIES DON’T HAVE TIME TO GROCERY SHOP OR FIGURE OUT WHAT TO EAT.
WE SEE THAT THERE ARE OTHER MEAL KIT COMPANIES ON THE MARKET, BUT FIND THAT THEY TAKE SOME OF THE TRUE EXPERIENCE OUT OF COOKING, SINCE THEIR INGREDIENTS ARE PRE-MEASURED AND PRE-PORTIONED.
Feature Mapping
Competitive Landscape
IDEATe
ADD WIREFRAME
PROTOTYPE
We wanted to see how people would respond to our proposed solution. In doing so, we chose 100 participants who had previously stated they were often confused when it came to preparing dinner, hating grocery shopping, or wanted to learn to cook.
We presented them with our test meal kit, which at the time was called “1-Click Groceries,” which was an Italian meal kit made up of 11 ingredients and 5 recipes.
USER RESEARCH
After distributing the meal kits to the participants on a Monday afternoon, we asked them to document their experiences and fill out a survey which focused user preferred packaging, recipe formats, which equipment and ingredients most commonly found at home, recipe quality, and value proposition:
Conclusion
Gathering our results from the survey, we concluded that customers preferred the following:
Recyclable thermal bags
Recipes in printed form
we can assume consumers already have the following in their kitchens: pots, pans, graters, and salt.
Making cooking pleasant is a balance between affordability, simplicity, and taste.
Consumers would be willing to pay between $40-$50 for the meal kits
Cooking 5 meals from scratch was unrealistic for most consumers.
Understanding this, we made the following adjustments:
Sourced sturdy, thermal zip bags
Improved our recipe template by adding step-by-step, illustrated photos
Reduced the number of recipes from 5 to a reasonable 3.
Mobile Prototype
After showing this prototype to several testers, we noted the following:
The “bundle” shop screen didn’t provide enough information about how many ingredients they would receive in a kit.
Testers also wanted more context about the meal kits from the shop tab - How many recipes did it include? Did it cater to special diets and allergies?
The ingredient icons didn’t inspire the desire to cook.
