Meal Planning Without the Struggle
A mobile app that helps young adults make confident meal decisions throughout the week, without forcing new habits, tracking calories, or scrolling through recipes they'll never cook.
Challenge
Process
The project started with a straightforward question: "why do people who want to eat well still end up ordering takeout on a Tuesday night?" This question is rooted in my own personal life experiences, and after some deep reflection, the answer wasn't that they (we) lacked recipes or motivation; it was that the decision itself was the problem. By the time someone is tired and hungry at 6pm, choosing what to cook from scratch feels like too much work, even when the ingredients are already in the fridge, and it was that insight shaped everything that followed.
From there I focused on defining the user clearly. The target audience is young adults, college students and recent grads, who cook regularly enough to care about eating well, but inconsistently enough that they're constantly re-solving the same problem every week. It was only once the user group was clear, that the direction of the design that I wanted to implement became apparent. I decided that the app needed to move the decision from the middle of the week evening (when the common user is busy) to the weekend (when there's more headspace), and make the main planning moment as fast and low-friction as possible.
Now, before drawing a single screen, I wanted to look at what already existed. I found that Recipe apps like "Mealime" put discovery first, which is great if you want to find new food but completely misses the person who already knows what they eat. Manual tools like "Notion planners" are flexible but require motivation to maintain and have no structure to guide you. None of the existing options were built around the specific moment of deciding (they were all built around either cooking or shopping), treating the moment of decision as something that would be easy to figure out on your own, and it was that exact that gap that I had the idea for DailyPlate.
With the problem defined, I worked through the information architecture before touching visuals. The core flow is intentionally short: open the app, see your week, tap an empty slot, pick a meal, done. The weekly view comes first, and that is because framing the experience around a calendar with empty slots to fill is fundamentally less overwhelming than being asked to choose from thousands of options.
The visual design followed simple UX logic. Meal cards are deliberately minimal. They consist of a name, a couple of loose tags like "quick" or "filling," and an estimated prep time, followed by nuitrition information, and macros. The selection drawer that appears when you tap a slot is a bottom sheet rather than a full screen, which keeps the weekly view always in the background and makes the interaction feel like a quick choice (which it is). Every decision in the visual layer was made by asking the same question: "does this make the user feel more in control, or less?"
The cooking mode was the most personally motivated part of the project. As a visual learner, I find written recipe instructions genuinely harder to follow than they need to be. You have to build a mental image of each step before you can act on it, which slows you down and makes cooking feel more effortful than it is. So I designed the cooking experience as a visual sequence instead: one step per card, a large image at the top, a single short instruction below, and a tap to advance. It works like a slideshow. For anyone who finds text-heavy instructions a barrier to actually starting, this format removes that barrier almost entirely
Conclusion
Daily Plate is ultimately a project about respecting the user's energy. Most productivity and lifestyle apps — meal planning included — are built with the assumption that users have time, motivation, and mental bandwidth to engage deeply. Daily Plate was designed for the opposite assumption: that the person using it is already a little tired, already a little overwhelmed, and just needs the path of least resistance to a decent decision. The weekly grid, the minimal meal cards, the quick-pick drawer, the visual cooking steps — all of it is in service of that same idea. Good design for everyday habits doesn't ask people to change. It quietly makes the right choice the easy choice, and then gets out of the way.