Freshly Order Management Experience
Freshly is a subscription-based meal delivery service that offers a rotating menu of healthy dishes every week. The Meal Planner was redesigned to increase engagement across current and future delivery orders.
Redesigning the Core Subscriber Experience
Role: Product Designer
Team: Senior Product Manager, Senior Back-End Engineer, Front-End Engineer, QA Engineer
Methods: Data Analysis, Design Auditing, Usability Testing, Feature Prioritization, UX & UI Design
Duration: 2019 (6 months)
Context
Freshly’s core product experience was built around one primary action—managing a meal order for an upcoming delivery week. In addition, users were able to manage up to four delivery weeks in advance.
Data showed that users who engaged less with future delivery weeks were more likely to cancel their subscriptions. To drive reorder rates and improve retention, our focus was on rethinking how users could approach their meal planning experience more holistically.
Role
I led the end-to-end redesign of the Meal Planner experience on the web platform. This was an opportunity to encourage behaviors that support ongoing engagement with future orders, and to redefine how users could engage more effectively with their entire meal planning process.
Looking at the Data
To better understand how users were interacting with the existing Meal Planner experience, I partnered with my product manager to analyze engagement data and identify the most relevant actions users were taking in their meal planning journey.
The most frequented action users took was to choose or edit meals for the upcoming week—users cared most about picking which meals they’re going to get.
In addition, users who selected meals or edited deliveries for future weeks, early in their subscription, had roughly a 25% higher lifetime value than those who did not. This suggested that early engagement with future meal planning was positively correlated with stronger retention.
Framing the Opportunity
The opportunity was to explore how we might encourage users to engage more proactively with planning meals long-term. We hypothesized that if there was greater access to managing all weekly delivery orders, then engagement would increase and therefore improve LTV and overall retention.
Identifying Core Usability Issues
After analyzing the data, I audited the original Meal Planner design and cross-referenced various experience design frameworks from competing brands in the Food Tech space. With ~60% of traffic coming from mobile-web users, optimizing for smaller screens was an important factor. Ultimately, Freshly’s core product experience came down to three core usability issues—navigation inefficiency, unclear hierarchy of information/key actions, and disproportinate spatial prioritization. The functionality and visual composition of the original meal planner were not as optimal for neither the users’ immediate, or long-term meal planning goals.
Narrowing Design & Scope
Once I identified the main usability issues, I explored various design concepts to address the core issues, and narrowed the explorations down to three different design directions in close collaboration with the Product and Engineering teams. The Meal Planner redesign was a comprehensive overhaul covering all supporting flows, edge cases, and states across this point of the user’s journey:
Changing meal selections
Skipping a delivery week
Editing delivery date
Tracking a delivery
Changing meal quantity
Editing delivery address
Testing the Bird’s Eye View
After presenting my recommendations with the team, I built prototypes for each design concept and scheduled user testing sessions with 10 subjects to measure user expectations and the effectiveness of each design concept.
User testing confirmed that variations with redesigned UI components improved the visibility and discoverability of primary actions (like changing meals, or updating delivery details). The majority of users also rated one of the concepts featuring an overview of all weeks significantly higher for ease of navigating compared to the other concepts, including the original Meal Planner design. This reinforced our belief that giving users easier access to all delivery weeks would lower the barrier to proactive engagement with future orders.
Designing for Visibility
The core improvements included modifying UI components to improve discoverability and visual hierarchy of key actions, and eliminating the navigational dropdown (on mobile) and side panel (on desktop) to display all weekly orders on one page. The new design provided greater visibility across all delivery weeks, reducing interaction costs and enabling more efficient navigation when managing multiple weekly orders within the same session:
Prioritizing For the Future
While the top design objectives for the Meal Planner redesign addressed core usability improvements, there were several competing opportunities aligned with our goal to increase reorder rate and improve overall retention—one of which was to visually broaden the users' perception of meal variety (e.g. surfacing new meals more prominently).
This was another promising avenue given that the users’ perceived lack of variety in our product offerings was among one of the top themes from user testing and ongoing user feedback. However, given the scope, priority, and impact of the new Meal Planner rollout, I moved forward with descoping this design direction for future iterations.
Outcomes & Handoff
I had transitioned into a new role before post-launch data became available, however the Meal Planner redesign clearly addressed several critical usability issues that created friction in the reorder experience. The new experience became more accessible, easier to navigate, and quicker to use. Feedback from users and internal teams consistently validated these improvements, indicating that the new Meal Planner design was not only more streamlined, but also well-positioned to drive stronger engagement and long-term retention.
To ensure the team’s success after the new meal planner was released, I facilitated transitional roadmap planning discussions for future iterations beyond this launch, and I was more than happy to continue providing post-handoff support for our engineers after my departure.