PLAN SHOP COOK was created to help empower users who don't normally cook from scratch to enjoy a healthy home-cooked meal. This app is meant to help you follow a meal plan based on your goals, activity levels, health conditions and dietary requirements. 

Imagine using an app that saves you time and keeps you staying organized while helping you follow a tailored transformation program.

The problem is that this program has hundreds of tailored recipes but no way to quickly navigate them. On top of that, it takes a lot of time and effort to plan, organise and follow this program. 

Although this program is over 3 years old and has over 600K body transformations stories it has one major flaw - it comes in a PDF format.

It took me over four hours every week to plan and shop for the recipes. 

It’s exhausting to copy and paste the ingredients from each recipe, multiply it by how many portions you plan to cook and also for how many people. An app urgently needed to happen.  

The challenge

Capture all the flavours into an easy to to use app

The challenge was to create a user-friendly app that captures Joe's fitness program. The goal was to simplify the process of following the program's recipes received via email with a PDF attachment. However, the user experience was complicated. The high-level goals were to make planning, shopping, and cooking weekly meals fast and easy, as well as provide insights and feedback on the program's impact.

The insights

1. Users found meal planning overwhelming, especially when managing long ingredient lists without family participation. 

2. Writing down grocery lists on paper was frustrating and time-consuming, especially for multiple people. 

3. Ingredient swapping was difficult without clear guidance. 

4. Most users cook more than 3 CYO meals per week, prioritizing batch-cooking recipes with leftovers. 

5. Online grocery shopping is common, especially for those without a car.

Reframing the problem

After reviewing all the touchpoints and customer channels, I broke the journey into five phases: plan the week, choose meals, shop, prep the ingredients and cook the food.

The Vision

Food planning made easy

My vision was to create an easy-to-use app for an evolving business with a diverse range of end-users. I wanted the users to drop pen-and-paper food planning and instead use this time better. 

Through the app, I envisioned the future of the Joe Wicks program — and the weekly shopping experience — to be deeply personalised to customers' food tastes and habits.

Design strategy

Perfecting the planning

Three primary questions informed my design strategy: 

1. How might we take the effort out of meal planning? 

2. What shopping contexts need to be considered? 

3. How can we make the cooking experience better?

I mapped out the steps in each of the key user journeys.

Chaotic to organised

 A significant reason for chaotic meal planning is that users often have to look after meals for other family members too. Those family members typically have different food preferences and don’t want to follow the Body Coach program. This causes the user to be inconsistent and overwhelmed by the overall process.

 The research data revealed that:

• 83% of users have children

• 68% are cohabiting but do the program alone

• 55% regularly swap ingredients on the list

Based on these insights, I developed two key feature concepts: Swap Tool and Filter Recipes, to help the users be more organised and flexible with the plan. 

Inefficient to optimised

A critical part of the Shop experience is that the user can save hours spent every week going through the list of ingredients and portions.

The research data revealed that:

1. The average weekly grocery list for one person has 26 items

2. 75% eat the same thing a few times a week

3. 48% buy groceries online

Based on these insights, I proposed three key feature ideas: Shopping List, Edit Shopping Quantity and Buy Online. 

The app automatically calculates the amounts of each ingredient based on the recipes it is used in, increasing amounts when you need to add extra portions - like for family members.

All in a tickable list that can be easily shared, or ordered online from local supermarkets.

Elaborated to simplified

 This plan offers over 180 delicious recipes. But there is also the option to create 1000s of CYO (Create Your Own) recipes by combining ingredients from each food group  (carbs, protein, fats).

The research data revealed that:

1. 70% cook over 3 CYO (Create Your Own) meals per week

2. 58% prefer recipes that can be batch cooked

3. Half of the recipes are never cooked 

Based on these insights, I proposed two feature concepts: CYO (Create Your Own) and Batch Cook to help users be more efficient.

Central to the feature were these key ideas: 

• Make it easy for people to create and save their CYO recipes. 

• Support customers who like to cook their favourite recipes in bulk, helping them to save time and reduce food waste.

The next step is to reach out to the Joe Wicks team to show this project and my UX suggestions. I truly believe there are good research findings in here and some great design solutions.