MealMates: Cooking without conflict
Summary
MealMates is a kitchen coordination platform that turns the chaos of shared cooking into an easy, collaborative experience. With synced schedules and real-time kitchen availability, it helps roommates avoid conflicts, plan meals, and even connect over cooking.
I developed MealMates as my Technology and Human Interaction capstone project during winter quarter. As the lead product designer, I shaped the product vision and designed the end-to-end experience, aiming to create technology that not only solves logistical headaches but also fosters community in shared living spaces.
Role
Product Designer
Team of 4
Timeline
Feb 2025 - March 2025
Skills
Interaction Design, Visual Design, Prototyping, App Concepting, User Testing
Tools
Figma, FigJam
Prototype Overview
The missing ingredient to coordinating cooking off-campus
THe PROBLEM
Uncoordinated meal plans and cooking timing spark roommate tensions, stress, and food waste
When college juniors transition off-campus, they face a perfect storm of new responsibilities: they must suddenly manage meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking—all while navigating shared kitchen spaces with multiple roommates. This sudden shift from having structured meals to full food independence often collides with limited kitchen access and busy class schedules. Thinking about how we could smooth this transition prompted MealMates, helping students manage cooking and coordination without the chaos.
Competitive Analysis
What the market looks like
Before committing to a problem space, we first proposed apps and researched existing solutions for each idea, to understand the market and identify gaps. Once we committed to the problem space of cooking and kitchen coordination, we focused on how our approach could stand out.
USER RESEARCH
Contextual Inquiry
I conducted a contextual inquiry with a 21-year-old junior at Northwestern University who lives off-campus with three roommates in the same academic year. The household shares responsibility for chores, grocery shopping, and other joint purchases, coordinating these tasks through a mix of informal agreements and group communication.
The participant’s primary objective is to ensure that responsibilities are distributed equitably and completed on schedule, while maintaining open communication to prevent misunderstandings or conflicts. Task frequency varies: groceries are typically purchased weekly, meals are collaboratively planned and prepared, and miscellaneous chores are assigned and tracked on a rotating basis.
Finding our mvp
Narrowing Scope
While our early-stage vision was to create an solution for all things off-campus living (chores, cost splitting, and groceries), conducting a contextual inquiry allowed us to uncover and define the most salient pain point in the participant's living arrangement, primarily relating to cooking and meal preparation.
key Pain Point
Meal planning and grocery lists are informal
The contextual inquiry revealed that meal planning and grocery list creation were largely informal processes, relying on memory and unspoken cues rather than explicit coordination among roommates. This lack of structured communication often resulted in inefficiencies, including skipped recipe steps, unplanned ingredient substitutions, and missed opportunities for alignment.
Room for opportunity
With these insights, we identified clear opportunities for intervention. These pain points informed the design of a shared grocery list and meal planning feature to streamline communication. The app could prompt users to update the list, notify roommates of planned meals and timing, track ingredient availability to reduce last-minute substitutions, and recommend similar recipes to make the most of shared ingredients.
Synthesis
Synthesizing Insights
The main theme I found was that students are frustrated between the gap between available information and the realities of taking a class. CTECs and course catalogs provide surface-level details, turning students to word-of-mouth to fill in missing context they seek.
But these peer insights aren't available to everyone. They're highly dependent on who you know, leaving many students without access to the advice they need. To address these challenges, I prioritized these three key insights to guide my design and defined key features.
Where current solutions fall short
No existing solution combines meal planning, kitchen scheduling, and roommate coordination: the very pain points that define off-campus cooking. Recognizing this gap, we focused on creating a platform that combines meal planning, ingredient sharing, and real-time kitchen scheduling all in one place.
Three main themes emerged from affinity mapping my research findings...
INSIGHT #1
Students patch together tools and still feel unsure
70% use official resources and peer advice, but not single resource gives them the full picture.
INSIGHT #2
"Good" means personal fit, not just ratings
90% prioritize content and schedule fit. Students want specifics: workload, assignment types, and teaching style, not just percentages or general reviews.
INSIGHT #3
Friends shape choices, but it's high-stakes
65% trust friends just as much as CTECs, yet 80% fear giving bad advice. Planning stress spikes during registration as classes fill fast.
I arrived at a critical question…
How might we design a course planning app that brings trusted peer insights and official information together in one place?
Moving into wireframes
Building on these insights, I moved into wireframing. With many potential directions still on the table from user needs, I turned to low-fidelity sketches to distill and prioritize ideas. This process helped me focus on the app's most essential features while staying realistic about the project's time constraints.
Social Feed Iterations
Starting off, I thought about how I might organize the social feed: one of the most important features of the app. I knew this would take a bit of iteration before getting it right, so I started with paper before translating wireframes into Figma.