FreshBite
Driving retention by reducing the effort of planning and ordering.
Role
Product Designer
Duration
4 Weeks
Team
Cindy W., Skye M., Wing K.
MISSION
Design a meal delivery service platform that drives long-term retention.
RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY
Why do current meal kit services experience high-drop off rates?
To understand why many meal-kit services fail to retain users long term, we analyzed the current market and evaluated existing platforms.
Our research focused on understanding friction and pain points within the current services to address in FreshBite.
Estimate % of User Who Canceled
40%- 50%
1 month
60%- 70%
3 months
70%- 80%
6 months
85% - 95%
12 months
Meal Kit Drop-Off Rates Over Time
Around 50% of users are cancelling after sign-up and less than 5% stay after a year
What the users are saying:
Hard to keep up
"Managing the meals started to feel stressful to keep up with every week."
Decision fatigue
"Scrolling through meals and deciding what to eat each week gets tiring."
Lack of personalization
"I wanted meals that were more aligned with my preferences and taste."
THE QUESTION
Can reducing mental effort and supporting habitual use drive retention?
OPTIONS AND TRADEOFFS
Relevance Over Discovery
Throughout the design process, we explored multiple directions that addressed the core problems, particularly between easier discovery and prioritizing relevance. We intentionally chose to make for surfacing relevant details and meals, rather than push for easier exploration for these reasons:
Reduce Weekly Effort
Helps the users manage meals with minimal thought and time.
Limit Thinking Through Filters
Allow users to quickly find meals that fit their needs without relying on filters.
Personalize without overwhelming
Deliver meals that match user preferences without constant filtering or manual setup.
Helping users manage their meals
Most meal kit services push users to order more without accounting for what they already have or what’s on the way. This forces users to mentally track meals across multiple states, adding friction to a simple question: what should I eat next?
The home page acts as a meal command center, showing meals at home, in delivery, and in the cart to limit of mental effort required to track meal status.
Smarter Meal Search
Users rely on a small set of meals they repeat weekly, while still wanting the option to try something new. To support both behaviors while minimizing search effort, we:
1. Prioritize past meal history and favorites
Integrated AI meal search engine for discovering new meals
Adapting To The Users Preference
To retain users, the experience must evolve around the user's preferences.
We designed a food-scanning feature that allows users to scan new foods and receive tailored ingredient lists and recipes, giving them flexibility to recreate meals at home while reinforcing habitual use of the service.
OUTCOME
Tested with 8 users.
Higher Satisfaction
73% of participants stated they would switch to FreshBite from their current meal kit services.
Low Mental Workload Score
Participants reported a mental workload score of 38/100 on the NASA-TLX.
NASA-TLX