Hexey is a meal planning and weekly food delivery service for health-conscious young women, young men who are just beginning to cook and middle-aged busy professional women. Their site at the time only offered a limited selection of pre-packaged meals and snacks for a set number of days a week.

In light of the narrow range of their product and service offering, Hexey wanted to roll out a breadth of custom meal planning options which transitioned their business model from delivering ready-made meals to delivering all of the groceries necessary to make any home-cooked meal.

An integrated custom recipe-to-grocery delivery service concept —which leads users through recipe inspiration, meal customization, and meal planning — was put forward within a 2 week turnaround time inclusive of research, design and usability testing.

Inspiration. The notion of inspiration was woven into the user experience through editorial content. The editorial content focused on addressing the motivations and pain points of the personas.

Meal Customization.  Multiple pathways to recipes were designed to cater to the time requirements of each persona (browsing vs. task-oriented).

Weekly Meal Planning. An intelligent but flexible meal planner that automatically adds saved recipes for ingredient customization at a later phase of the journey was introduced.

The finer details of the concept arose from the research and analysis phase of the project. Since Hexey required more flexibility in meal customization, the research objective was to identify exactly how much customization would be the right amount of customization for the needs of Hexey’s users.

The following methods were performed to achieve this aim:

User flows, wireframes (paper wireframes, Omnigraffle) and an interactive prototype (InVision) were designed to fully reflect the findings of the research phase.

A heuristic analysis of six online recipe destinations and food delivery services were evaluated on their performance in 5 distinct pathways:

Figuring Out Who Did it Best

A ranking system was used to distinguish who performed the best within each category (1 being best and 6 being the worst). Plotting the ranking order of each brand depicted a clear picture of whose strengths shined through at which stage.

The competitive analysis demonstrated that increased meal customization can be designed in such a way that simplifies meal planning and preparation. However, there is a certain point where offering too many choices compromises the value offered by the business. The recommendation that came out of this was to offer users medium to high customization flexibility through the redesign.

Hexey developed three personas prior to my involvement: Jackie, a budget and health-conscious young woman; Gilbert, a young man who are just beginning to cook and Aaral, a middle-aged busy professional woman.

Getting to What Was Important 

For the Users, Of Course

A needs analysis was performed on the personas to determine primary and secondary needs. Representational pie charts were created to illustrate what was important to each persona. Doing so allowed me to identify if there were any shared priorities among them. These shared priorities (quick and easy recipes) eventually translated into prioritized navigation and higher ranked content for these things in the design.

How Much Time People Have

With the primary needs, secondary needs and the lifestyles of each persona in mind, a time investment scale (low to high) was developed. This scale plotted each persona’s willingness to devote themselves to learning, inspiration, meal planning and purchase tasks.

Persona-Driven Content and Features

The results of the analysis funneled into the user requirements, interaction design, user interface design and content strategy.