Phoodster was initially thought as a platform to find supermarket food deals in Sweden by matching them with hundreds of recipes from selected recipe websites. By allowing your phone to track your location, it would help users find the nearest store in order to to find low-budget recipes to save money. The app was divided in categories such as vegetarian or soups. These would be arranged based on the selected preferences of the user chosen on the onboarding.
As the founders saw the current business model difficult to monetise without in-app advertising (and VC’s pressure to generate revenue), they decided to move away from targeting low budget, cheap-recipe hunters and start targeting health-conscious young professionals. With this change, the app design also needed to evolve. Now it would focus on assisting its users to create a sustainable healthy lifestyle by providing free recipes, charging for meal plans and providing a habit tracker.
To aesthetically convey this goal, I decided to make the UI more clean and minimal by:
- Replacing red with white or transparencies through the app.
- Using thinner line fonts and icons.
- Using minimal food images that focused on the essentials.
I designed new meal plans feature that provided balanced daily meal recipes for our users. The content was created with the help of a nutritionist and consisted of 6 meal plans that would cover the most common needs of our users.
- Each plan would be divided into 4 categories: Breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner.
- Each category would contain 10 recipes for a total of 40 recipes per plan.
- The recipes would contain the usual such as description, steps and ingredient.
- Each ingredient would contain nutritional information, serving tip and cooking tips.
The habit tracker (named coach on the app) is a premium feature that’s complementary to the users chosen plan. It aims to help building a sustainable meal routine. On this tab the user would see a list of suggested habits related to the plan that the user can choose from.
- Habits were created by an expert nutritionist.
- Users can choose up to three habits.
- Users progress can be seen on the Me tab.
- Users are encouraged to repeat them daily with notifications and badges.
In order to engage the user and make tasks fun and enjoyable, I created a total of playful characters based on food items. To obtain the badges the user would have to complete a series of goals listed on the habit tracker, as for example, have 3 glasses of water a day or eat vegetarian meals for a straight week.
These badges would be displayed on the Me tab. They would get triggered on the moment an action has been completed a certain number of times. Besides it, a share button is displayed at the bottom in case the user wanted to share it on social media or a messaging app.
The app at its prime achieved more than 10,000 users but the startup went out of business because the idea didn't attract enough paying customer and it ran out of funds. It was a great ride and I enjoy working with my team through the ups and downs.
