Carb Manager is the #1 low carb, keto, and macro tracker in the App Store and Google Play store with over 15 million users and 600k+ ratings.
As one of the biggest sections in the Carb Manager app, the Meals Hub serves as the focus for discovering recipes, meal plans, and anything meals related which are one of the biggest drivers for premium conversion. My task was to drive the project of re-imagining the meals section of the app and creating a new experience that promotes content discovery and better access to entry points to create meal plans, access custom foods, and more…
Role
- Responsible for leading the project from start to finish by collaborating with PMs, Engineers, and stakeholders to validate and launch project.
- Advocating for the user and defending decisions with data and real user feedback.
- Presenting the project throughout the way to other departments such as content/recipe writers, marketing, and customer support. As well as hosting workshops to receive their feedback.
Key Actions
- Cross-Functional Team Collaboration
- UX Research & Analysis
- User Testing
- Wireframe & Prototype
- Hi-Fidelity Design
- Development Handoff & Support
The Problem
Through user interviews, analytics, and customer support feedback, we determined that the current meals section not promoting content discovery and a lot of key sections were hidden and not accessible. We received feedback that users didn’t even know we had a Meal Planner, and visits to our premium recipes pages were extremely low.
Goals
By conducting workshops with various departments, we put together some goals on what we aimed to achieve with the new design. Some of the most important goals we wanted to achieve were improving content discovery, promoting click through to meal planner/shopping list, making favorites more discoverable, and overall making the section have a more inviting and friendly feel like a “home page”.
The Process
User Research
We are always conducting user interviews and through this time we decided to focus them on the meals section. We interviewed 5 existing users via Zoom, and 10 users who never used carb manager via usertesting.com and asked them about the current meals section, how they used it, what improvements would help them use it more, and many other questions. We also ran a typeform survey where we asked users questions to get a general understanding of users meal planning and recipe finding habits.
The goal of the user research was to get real feedback and suggestions and to understand user behaviors and patterns in order to better inform our re-design.
Competitor Analysis & Brainstorming
As part of my process I always conduct competitor analysis to get an idea of industry trends and the design solutions of competitors and how they may impact their users. By understanding these parts of competitors’ products, it helped us understand trends and patterns and how to design our product above others and identify our product’s strength against others. This step also helps to gather inspiration to start informing wireframes.
Wireframes & User Flows
After having a good idea of our problems, goals, user pain points I had a ton of ideas on how to improve those frustrations. I spent some time wireframing and coming up with various solutions, presenting to the team, and iterating before settling on a final wireframe that I wanted to validate.
User Testing & Validation
After testing on usertesting.com with 20 participants, as well as introducing the wireframes in our user interviews we received a lot of great feedback which we were able to iterate on and improve. Overall the experience was a huge improvement and we clearly noticed an improvement in users being able to find sections much more efficiently and faster. The large majority of users also commented on how the section felt more inviting and promoted them to browse more which was one of our main goals.
The Solutions
18.5%
Increase in recipe page views
3.8%
Increase in Meal Plans applied
9.8%
Increase active user visiting Meals page
101%
Increase in Recipes Imported!
The Result
After launching the hub we received great feedback from users and also validated our findings with data. The results demonstrated increases in recipe page visits which in turn led to more premium conversions, huge increase in meal plan creation and shopping list usage, and much more…
We also have plans to further improve the hub by providing a personalized experience for users where they can see recipes catered to their preferences, introducing their meal plans and allowing to edit, and much more…