To kick off my discovery phase (during lockdown) I carried out a survey with mainly family and friends to discover what was driving this rise in popularity of meal kits.

The goal was to get a general idea of eating habits throughout lockdown and help me determine whether creating such a platform was a goal worth pursuing. I crafted a survey of 10 questions using Google Forms.

I learnt what people were doing in lockdown and a rough idea of their experience using meal kits. I also learned about platforms like Gousto and meal kit services provided by chefs on Instagram. It was something growing in popularity. After brief conversations with participants who had used meal kits, I discovered that most found the quality better than takeaway and the kits easy to prepare.

I thought it important to look at how some of the restaurants that recently pivoted to or already offered meal kits tackled the problem. I looked at Hawksmoor, Burger and Beyond and Dirty Bones. I also looked at Deliveroo as an already established food delivery platform.

One of the main differences between the meal kit services and platforms like Deliveroo was that orders were only available to be delivered on certain days. This was likely due to logistical issues like the time it would take to prepare and package the kits, and to reduce food wastage.

There were also other important differences, such as the availability of cook time estimates and instructions. These came in the form of text, downloadable PDFs and even video tutorials. You can see a spreadsheet of the main differences I found **here.**

I also for research purposes (and research purposes only) ordered a meal kit from Burger & Beyond in order to help understand the end to end process. What I received didn't really surprise me, portioned and refrigerated food along side a sheet with instructions (that were also available on the site). Although this may be due to the food being burgers, making my meal was quick, easy and the outcome was delicious (10/10, would recommend).

From my research of similar platforms, I decided what the main user journeys would be. I didn't try to reinvent the wheel as I wanted to keep it familiar and intuitive. I focused on the customer picking a restaurant and ordering a kit as both a guest and member on desktop and phone app. Other important user journeys included customer sign-up, and restaurant sign-up and onboarding.

With the user journeys, I began ideating on the arrangement of the screens on desktop and as a mobile app. I started with sketches before moving on to low-fidelity wireframes, some of which you can view below or in this Figma prototype.
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As I discovered during the research phase, choosing a delivery date was an important differentiator between this platform and regular takeaway platforms. I, therefore, decided it was vital to have this at the beginning of the process so the user could have a better idea of what was available for when they wanted it. Keeping in mind that some users still may have wanted to browse, untied to a specific delivery day, I made date selection available at different stages of the process. I opted not to have a page with just delivery selection as I felt it was just an unnecessary chance for people to abandon when they would preferably instead look at what restaurants were available, and plan around that.

It would be available in the filters, product page, main page and at checkout. It was also important because it would stop users from ordering different things from multiple restaurants in one go. My thoughts were that being able to order from different restaurants, for different dates, with multiple delivery charges would quickly become confusing for the user, so I limited it to one restaurant per order.

Halfway through the project, I created a pattern library. It contains the colours, fonts, buttons, inputs and other design elements in various states. This was to have a master document to refer to during the design process that would help keep everything consistent, whilst also speeding up the process. Underneath are some screenshots and you can view the entire Figma file through the link directly below.

After going back and forth between my wireframes and pattern library, ensuring I had done everything, I moved on to the final designs. Admittedly, it wasn't the smoothest process. I still realised there were some elements and parts of the process missing whilst designing. Still, putting everything felt more thorough than my previous projects. Below are my outcomes for both the website platform and mobile application.

I am happy with the results of this project. I believe I tackled the problem that I set out to solve and learnt a lot along the way. It's helped me realise the amount of consideration it will take to tackle something of a similar scale in its entirety, and the amount of manpower required. I frequently had to restrict my scope as I kept realising and coming up with ideas that would be important to the whole platform but would require a lot of time and research to do effectively.

I also found myself going back to wire-framing, adding and removing things from screens. Working with a team would have minimised this, but some issues could've been remedied with earlier testing and possibly even sharing my work and process with other designers.

I was able to try something new in creating a pattern library. I would try to do so again from the beginning of my next project. Despite creating it later in the project, it helped me identify and remedy where things had become inconsistent. Although a pattern library is not a design system, I can imagine how helpful it would be when working with developers and other designers on future projects.