User Experience Research Portfolio

Meal Maven

Before any screen could be tested, the question was more basic: who struggles with meal planning, and why. Surveys and interviews with fifteen participants, most of them Millennial and Gen X households in Texas, surfaced three human personas with genuinely different relationships to food. Jessica, a full-time working mother of three, spends about a third of her free time on meal planning and calls food "time and money." Lisa, an empty nester, calls it "medicine or poison" and a way to be remembered. Robert, a budget-conscious professional who travels for work, calls it "survival" and "security."

Each carried a distinct set of frustrations:

App overload and a pantry that is hard to track for Jessica
Cookbooks with too much text and not enough picture for Lisa
Scattered set of coupon apps that never quite fit his routine for Robert.
Runoff, pesticides, and packaging waste tied to food choices, a non-human stakeholder held alongside the human ones rather than treated as background for the fourth persona, Mirage Lake.

Meet the User Personas

Jessica

Working mom of three. Food is time and money.

Spends 32% of her free time involved in meal planning to cooking activities each week.

Lisa

Empty nester. Food is medicine, memory.

Spends 24% of her free time involved in meal planning to cooking activities each week.

Robert

Budget professional. Food is security.

Spends 20% of his free time involved in meal planning to cooking activities each week.

Mirage Lake

Non-human stakeholder. Bears the runoff.

Case Study Slides

A condensed, visual walkthrough of the Meal Maven project built for quick review, moving from the problem space through the research process to the design recommendations that came out of it.

Report

The full exploratory and generative UX research report, covering survey and interview findings, the competitor audit of Jow and Cooklist, persona development, and the design principles and feature priorities that followed.

Research Design

The usability testing research plan that carries Meal Maven from exploratory research into evaluative testing, laying out the moderated low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototype studies, the competitor benchmark against Cooklist, and how success will be measured.

Full Persona Write-Ups

In-depth profiles for Jessica, Lisa, Robert, and the non-human stakeholder Mirage Lake, each built out with habits, frustrations, problem and hypothesis statements, and Meal Maven's value proposition for them.

Task Map

Flow diagrams for the five core task journeys tested in the app: adding to the shopping list, updating the planner, browsing recipes, assessing what's on hand, and cooking, each marked with its counted opportunities for user error.

Key Persona Journey Map

A four-phase map of Jessica's week, tracking staples, planning and searching recipes, picking up groceries, and cooking, built from her role as the project's primary user persona.

Final Designs

The polished high-fidelity mockups for Meal Maven's five core functions, planner, cookbook, recipe browser, shopping list, and pantry, refined through the low-fidelity and high-fidelity testing rounds into the interface ready to carry forward into development.

Research Process

The research moved in two phases.

The first was exploratory: a screening survey, semi-structured interviews, empathy and affinity mapping, and an audit of two direct competitors, Jow and Cooklist, across ten criteria from feature functionality to pricing and review volume. That work built out to a journey map centered on Jessica's four-phase week, tracking staples as they run out, checking the calendar and searching recipes, picking up groceries, and cooking.

The second phase is evaluative, laid out in a usability testing plan now moving into execution. Five participants, drawn across all three personas, work through moderated low-fidelity and then high-fidelity Figma prototypes across five task flows, then a moderated Cooklist test for direct comparison. Success is measured against Cooklist on three fronts: task completion time, error rate, and System Usability Scale ratings, with any problems that surface ranked by severity and frequency using Erika Hall's tiering framework.

Solution

The findings converged on six design principles: accessibility, efficiency, personalization, transparency, inclusivity, and adaptability. Each reads differently depending on the persona. Accessibility means larger text and high contrast for Jessica's quick glances between tasks, text-to-speech and bigger images for Lisa's recipe following, and a minimal, predictable interface for Robert navigating a hotel kitchen.

Those principles fed a prioritization framework sorting opportunities by effort and reach: quick wins like saved store preferences, pantry photo capture, and a flag for reporting poor ingredient quality; medium-term work like local producer connections and seasonal recipe filtering; and longer-term ambitions like AI-assisted planning tied to a household's calendar and location, and attention to food deserts the app does not yet reach.

The deliverables carry this into the next phase: a persona set with problem, hypothesis, and value proposition statements for Jessica, Lisa, Robert, and Mirage Lake, a journey map, a competitor audit report, and the usability testing plan that will validate whether the redesign closes the gaps this research found.

The Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development came to this research with falling traffic and book sales, with the open question: was the content failing, or was something else.

The read-through rate on Eco Bible told a different story. Seventy-two percent of readers who started the book in 2024 kept going, so the people who found it were staying with it. The trouble was upstream. Eco Bible was acting as a front door that never opened into the room behind it, drawing readers who never learned that ICSD, the organization behind the book, existed at all and a lack of a retention strategy.

Six interviews and a broader survey sorted that audience into three human personas. Elias, a pastoral interpreter, already believes in the mission and just needs material close enough at hand to move from research into a sermon. Marianna, a devotional grounder, wants small, scripturally rooted pieces that fit into a life already full. Blair, a pluralistic seeker, is spiritually active but unaffiliated with any single tradition, and needs a way in that does not ask her to pick one. Three non-human forces, surveillance and censorship, burnout, and disinformation, sit alongside them as design stakeholders whose pressure shapes whether any of this actually gets used.

Each carried a distinct set of frustrations:

Scattered, hard-to-adapt material across too many sources for Elias
Clarity that comes at the cost of the text's sacred weight for Marianna
No welcome mat without picking a single tradition for Blair
Surveillance, profiling, and legal intimidation of advocates from Shadie
Burnout, eco-anxiety, and moral overwhelm eroding practice from the Inner Tempest
Half-truths and manufactured controversy fracturing shared reality from the Whispering Tide

Meet the User Personas

Elias

Pastoral interpreter. Needs proximity, not persuasion.

Marianna

Devotional grounder. Wants illumination, not simplification.

Blair

Pluralistic seeker. Wants a way in without a tradition.

Shadie

Surveillance and censorship. Watches from inside the platforms meant to carry the message.

Inner Tempest
Burnout and eco-anxiety. Rises from within the very communities doing the work.

Whispering Tide
Disinformation. Doesn't need to win the argument, just make certainty feel naive.