Company:
Phoodster
Year:
2017 - 2018 (14m)
Team:
Project manager, IOS Developer, UX Designer
Issue:
The original app was intended to help users find cheap recipes, but it was hard to monetize without ads.
Challenge:
Redesigning and expanding the existing app into a profitable health-focused app with a premium habit tracker feature that meaningfully engages users and supports long-term lifestyle habits.
Outcome:
The habit-tracking Coach became the core engagement and monetisation feature, increasing weekly active users by 38% and improving 14-day retention by 27%. Users who activated habits visited 2.4× more often, and 65% of premium conversions followed a completed habit streak. The app reached 10,000+ users, validating the shift toward habit-driven health guidance.
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.
The focus is now on helping users build a sustainable, healthy lifestyle by offering free recipes, while charging for meal plans and a habit tracker.
Meal Plans
The meal plans feature offered nutritionally balanced daily recipes designed to support users’ most common dietary needs. All content was created in collaboration with a certified nutritionist and organized into six distinct meal plans.
Each plan was structured across four daily moments—breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner—with 10 recipes per category, resulting in 40 recipes per plan. Every recipe included a clear description, step-by-step instructions, and a detailed ingredient list. Each ingredient was enriched with nutritional information, serving recommendations, and practical cooking tips.
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 focus on the essentials
Habit Tracker
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.
Gamification
In order to engage the user and make tasks fun and enjoyable, I created a series of playful character ba– dges 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.
About
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.
