Unlike most recipe/meal planning apps - straightforward, utilitarian, a means to an end - I wanted to impart the happiness that comes with putting together a meal for a loved one.Ĭopy: I used conversational language (“Hello there, Hannah!” “So, what’s for dinner?”) to make a user feel like that were with a friend. It’s meant to sound soft and evoke an approachable friendliness.

The name of my app, Malu (MAH-loo), is the Filipinx word for main course “ulam” (OOH-lam) spelled backward. This is what I wanted to impart with every bit of this product. In the Philippines, food is a vehicle for love.

From user testing, this didn’t seem worth the extra user or engineering effort, since users didn’t usually know or care when a certain recipe would be made, just that it would be made at some point soon. NOT making a user assign a recipe to a day - other meal planning apps force users to assign a recipe to a specific day. Lineup recipes vs normal recipes - I created a distinguishing factor (a bright yellow line) to serve two purposes: 1) lessening the chance of duplicative recipe adding by showing which recipes are already there and 2) adding an instant confirmation factor (after a user adds a recipe to their Lineup, there is confirmation they added it) This was as opposed to a ‘Select multiple recipes to add’ process, which might be faster, but didn’t align with the thoughtfulness users had when meal planning (they tend to look through each recipe first and assess before adding to a meal plan vs adding in bulk)

Segmented controls (with The Lineup as default) - this is the meat of the app, a quick way to get to what you’re cooking soon.Īdding to Lineup via Quick Menu in ‘All’ - tapping on a ‘More’ icon on each recipe allows you to add to the lineup.

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