Mealvana is a meal planning app designed to help you focus on what’s truly important to you – whether that’s eating healthier, saving time, finding new recipes to try, or cooking more adventurously. Mealvana allows you to customize your meal plan according to you or your family’s specific needs, and they take care of the rest – delivering weekly meal plans, recipe instructions, and shopping lists straight to your phone.
Wireframes, High Fidelity Designs, Style Guide, Prototype
Discovery & Design
Mealvana is currently in the beta testing process ahead of their first release to the app store in November 2021. With only a month until launch, we focused on delivering an improved onboarding experience for new users who have never opened the app before. The app is already robust with tons of useful features, and all it needed was a bit of a visual facelift. We collaborated with the Mealvana team to provide lightweight branding (colors, fonts, illustrations, and icons) that matched their overall vision for the project. With the branding elements in place, we started on wireframes to better understand how the onboarding experience needed to function. In the beta version, there is a single screen for the user to input all of their information – meal planning goals, number of people in the household, dietary restrictions, etc). A single screen works fine for editing existing information, but it’s not the most engaging experience for a new user – so we proposed breaking the questions apart into a more visual onboarding flow, complete with whimsical food illustrations.
We packaged all of this up into a beautiful deliverable, complete with wireframes, mockups, prototype, design system and illustrations, with plans to do a full UX overhaul in the future.
“Elizabeth and Kelli are very professional and responsive. They executed our vision better than we had imagined. Their design really made us stand out and we eventually won the Alabama Launchpad with our meal planning app.
To the startup founders out there - it may sound counterintuitive - but involving a professional designer early on would save you money and time in a long run by reducing the work you have to redo. The iterative process of lean development should start with a good design and a mindset which always put user experience in the center. ”