After conducting several rounds of user interviews, my group and I had identified that Northwestern University students, specifically those who live off-campus after their sophomore year, struggle with planning out their daily meals during the school year. During their first 2 years at Northwestern, undergraduate students are required to purchase the open-access meal plan, which is convenient for students who can't find the time to cook but creates a sense of dependency on sourcing food from the dining halls on campus.

Once these students move off-campus, they have to learn to organize food for themselves and generally resort to bulk cooking their meals at the beginning of the week in order to remove the stress of worrying about what to eat next during the weekdays. However, after 3-4 days of eating the same meal, students quickly get bored of their bulk cooking and end up scraping the food for a new meal or takeout instead. This also leads to a significant amount of waste in both cooked food and raw ingredients, especially when every week the recipes use different ingredients that don't always overlap. With that in mind, my group and I crafted the following statement to summarize the user need:

When I'm bored of the food I'm cooking from week to week, am on a budget, and don't feel like I have a significant amount of time to cook for myself, I want to be able to come up with nutritious recipes that are quick, interesting, and easy to make, so I don't have to worry about what my next meal will be.

To ensure that the user need was one that was truly experienced by the Northwestern undergraduate student population and to gain more information on how we could best cater to this need, I created the first part of my group's minimum viable product (MVP), which was a survey that with a series of questions that addressed these 6 categories:

From the results of the survey, we learned the following:

• Our target audience was confirmed to generally be Northwestern third-year undergraduate students living off-campus
• Most students identified themselves as having beginner to intermediate levels of cooking experience
• A little over 50% of our respondents would be willing to pay for a curated meal plan

From these results, my team and I reached out to 3 respondents who had said they were willing to pay for a curated meal plan and created custom meal plans for these users in order to receive feedback about the concept and the curated meal plans themselves. An example of this meal plan can be seen below:

After receiving feedback on the curated meal plans, I then created the final prototype of our app, which has the following features:

• Home tab: pulls up the next recipe the user will be cooking, which can expand to the recipe itself and regenerate with the following recipe after the current recipe has been completed
• Calendar tab: displays the user's meal plan for the next month with dates they should be cooking on, along with the names of the recipes he will be cooking
• Meal plans tab: displays the meals the user will be cooking every week, along with information about these recipes including the prep and cooking times, type of cuisine, and number of servings associated with each recipe so that the user no longer needs to meticulously research for their next recipes
• Groceries tab: asks the user to confirm whether they still has the following ingredients available from their previous grocery runs and auto populates the list for the user

The unique value that this app brings is that it takes into account the meals the user had this week and looks for recipes that use similar ingredients for next week’s meal plan, so that the user isn't left with oddball ingredients in their kitchen that quickly go bad or get forgotten over time.

Feel free to watch the video walkthrough or directly interact with the prototype below!