AI Voice Assistant
Liam the Lemon
Users can now get real-time guidance without having to disrupt their cooking process. Prioritized glanceable UI, minimal interaction cost, and natural voice input for hands-busy contexts.
HelloFresh
Digitally Enhancing The Meal Kit Experience
Overview
How do Chefs actually cook?
Problem
HelloFresh knew users’ orders, but not how they actually cooked, limiting personalization, in-moment support, and meaningful feedback.
Our task
The question we set out to solve was: how might we measure and digitally enhance the meal kit cooking experience for at-home chefs?
Meal Personalization
MyFresh
Users can generate personalized meals based on their ingredient and preference selections. The system interprets lightweight user inputs as signals to continuously refine recommendations, enabling quick decision-making and seamless progression from selection to recipe.
Meal Tracker
The Meal Diary
Users can log completed meals, capturing ratings, tweaks, time spent, and key milestones. This data turns into measurable insights on user satisfaction and engagement, while enabling users to reflect on past meals and track their progress over time.
mmm that was
User Hub
Profile Page
The profile aggregates key metrics like meals cooked, streaks, and badges, while surfacing social activity and shared experiences. This creates a lightweight social layer that supports discovery, motivation, and continued engagement over time.
Impact
Creating Value Beyond The Meal
Low-attention Use
Designed for hands-busy moments, allowing ~7 million users to navigate and cook without breaking flow.
Adaptive Personalization
Continuously refines recommendations based on user inputs, increasing relevance and long-term user retention.
Measurable User Insights
Captured ratings, time spent, and meal history to inform product decisions and improve recommendation quality.
Social & Shared Experience
Encourages discovery and connection, driving repeat usage and deeper user engagement.
Research
Seeing How People Actually Cook
User surveys, interviews, contextual inquiries, an ethnographic study, and competitive analysis helped us identify points of friction around attention, step clarity, and flow.
Ideation
Good Ideas Start With Bad Ones
Explored user pain points and ideas through mind mapping to uncover connections and generate potential solutions.
a loud audio message telling the user they will need to have multiple pots on the stove
an angry message large psa saying “deviate if you want”
tik tok dance on cooking techniques to teach beginner users
+ a round of worst possible ideas to keep things fresh
Concept Development
Turning Behaviors Into A Product
I translated our research into an early concept that could guide users while cooking, adapt to their choices, and turn each meal into something worth returning to.
Iteration
Making Every Interaction Clearer
Low-fi
- Dense layout with unclear grouping
- Smaller tap targets made scanning slower
Hi-fi
- Clear structure with labeled sections and hierarchy
- Consistent selection cards for fast interaction
Low-fi
- Text input slowed users down mid-task
- Layout didn’t match hands-busy context
Hi-fi
- Voice interaction enables quick, hands-free help
- Focused interface creates one clear action
Low-fi
- Cluttered, all-in-one screen
- Hard to focus on tasks
Hi-fi
- Step-based flow reduces cognitive load
- Progressive input guides users to completion faster
Reflection
Important Lessons
Design should be fun.
I leaned into adding small, delightful moments and realized that’s a core part of my style making products feel enjoyable, not just usable.
Design for real-world chaos.
When users are juggling multiple things, clarity matters most simple, consistent, and easy to scan interfaces win.
Iterate. Iterate. Iterate.
The best ideas came from constant iteration, being willing to rethink and refine led to stronger outcomes.