Freshly Mobile App Launch
Bringing the Experience to Mobile
Freshly is a subscription-based meal delivery service offering healthy meals on a weekly basis. The mobile app was designed to streamline the users’ meal planning experience.
Role: Product Designer
Team: Senior Product Manager, Senior Product Designer, Senior iOS Engineer, iOS Engineer, QA Engineer
Methods: User Research, Data Analysis, Information Architecture, User Testing, UX & UI Design
Duration: 2018 (6 months)
Context
When I joined Freshly, customers were only able to order meals through the desktop and mobile-web experience. On-going qualitative feedback revealed the growing need for a dedicated mobile app experience to manage subscriptions more conveniently. Recognizing this demand, we quickly identified this as a key business opportunity, making the development of Freshly’s first iOS app a top strategic priority.
Role
I led the design of the order and delivery management experience, in addition to co-designing several secondary experiences within the app in close collaboration with our Senior Product Designer. As a first release, this project focused on shipping a functional, user-aligned MVP, which laid the user experience down for future growth and user validation.
The top two criteria of the apps functionality were to enable users to manage weekly order/delivery settings, and enable users to edit their meal selections.
Understanding the User
The process began by researching and analyzing the behaviors of existing users and identifying the largest and most profitable segments of our customer base. Together with the Senior Product Manager and Senior Product Designer, existing data-sets over a span of one month (Inspectlet, Mixpanel, Optimizely) were analyzed, along with 342 e-mail surveys, 16 phone surveys, and 10 customer experience surveys—all of which helped us define the following types of users:
The largest segment of users focused on managing the next, upcoming week. In addition, users expressed that one of their main pain points was managing weekly order details in general (change meals, skip a week, update delivery details).
Defining the Experience
Based on these insights, I partnered with the team to design an order management experience that made it easier to modify order and delivery details, while keeping the upcoming order view central to the experience considering its importance. To guide my designs, I defined the following user goals that the experience needed to support:
Manage meal selections
Skip a delivery week
Modify delivery details
Review future orders
Thinking Holistically About Meal Planning
After defining the core criteria for the weekly order management experience, I moved into concept exploration and development. While my main focus was on the weekly order management experience itself, it was necessary for me to consider the structural and navigational implications across the entire infrastructure of the app, so that this part of the experience wouldn’t feel disconnected from the rest of the app.
I mapped various information architecture frameworks and user flows for each new concept to ensure a holistic, coherent user experience, as it related to the order management experience. Altogether, the process resulted in two concept directions:
Concept 1: All weeks view
Concept 2: Week-to-week view
Bringing the Experience Together
Once my concept directions were fully developed, the team and I held extensive collaborative workshops to refine each of the core experiences and bring the entire app together into one cohesive user experience.
The result for the first release combined my work on the weekly order management experience, and the meal selection experience designed by our Senior Product Designer. (Other experiences of the app I designed throughout our team’s collaborative design efforts included the Current Order screen and Account tab.)
Constraints
While the interactive possibilities for the app’s new interface were truly endless, I resorted to relying on established design patterns for the first release due to time and resourcing constraints. The team and I would later come to integrate more interaction and interactive design elements into the app as we continued to iterate with each new release.
Outcomes
This first iOS app release was a major improvement over the sub-optimal mobile web experience, giving users a dedicated platform to manage their weekly deliveries and subscription settings. The launch addressed a long-standing request from users, and early qualitative feedback from initial adopters expressed enthusiasm for the new app release. Their responses helped inform the next iteration and shaped priorities for future improvements.
Retrospective
Given the agile nature of this first release, the app was largely validated internally by stakeholders and employees. As a result, I took the opportunity to institutionalize our team’s user testing process with new tools and integrating it more formally into the product development process for future developments.
Nonetheless, the team and I were able to conduct lightweight internal usability tests, successfully roll out the MVP, and begin monitoring engagement once the app launched. After the first release, the product team and I continued collaborating post-launch to iterate on the existing core experiences and enhance secondary features based on our long-term product goals.