Trifecta is a fitness meal delivery service with a mission to remove diet failure by delivering fresh, healthy meals right to your door. Trifecta tasked my group and I with assessing the comprehension of their new meal choice experience and identify any issues or opportunities in the meal selection process.
Client: Trifecta | Timeline: March - April 2023 | Group Members: Rosie Saqib and Erin Welch
Why is this in my portfolio? This user study showcases my ability to conduct user testing and synthesize data into actionable recommendations for the Trifecta team.
Methodology
Recruited participants on social media and by e-mail who currently use, have previously used, or are interested in using a meal delivery service.
Interviewed participants remotely, using screensharing technology and recording the audio and video of the user research sessions. Applied concurrent think aloud moderation. We had participants navigate the scenarios outlined in Appendix B.
Participants
There were key factors in selecting our final participants to ensure the data we collected was diverse and applicable to the companies product.
Age: As there average demographic audience was 30+, the majority of our participants fell in the range of 36 to 65, with one participant between the age of 18 to 25.
Activity Level: Trifecta’s focus demographic is active individuals as they also provide a training product as well (not tested in study). Are participants ranged in activity level, but the majority considered themselves in the moderate to daily active range.
Experience: Two-thirds of our participants had experience with prior meal delivery services. This provided us with an abundance of data as they came into the study with prior notions on how their experience would be.
Salary: We wanted to know our participants salary range as that plays a major role in the type of consumer. Customers using meal-delivery services pay a premium for the convenience factor. Half of our participants made under $75k, while the other half made above that.
Study Findings
“I want to see all the options. I feel like I’m missing out.”
Current plan selection process.Meal Plan Options: Users currently have the option to choose meals based on preselected meal-plan categories such as vegetarian, keto, paleo, etc. Our users felt that they were restricted to a certain plan and could not have a more custom diet. Our suggestion is to allow users to choose from multiple meal plans and have each meal labeled with which type of diet it would fit under if that was of importance. That way, users still have awareness of the diet plan they’re selecting from, but still have the freedom for customization.
“But what if I have an allergy?”
What if user is allergic to tomatoes?Preselected Meals: Once a meal plan is selected, users carts will be auto-populated with different meals. From there, they can deselect the meals added into their carts and choose other options available. With our users, we discovered that there is no allergen filter available. This is a significant finding because it can affect all users and it could have serious consequences if a user is exposed to an allergen. Our recommendation is to allow users to select certain allergen filters and then display a selection of preselected meals.
“After going to pricing, I realized meal prep items are extra ingredients.”
Current meal prep selection process.Additional Costs: In addition to selling ready made meals, Trifecta has a ‘Meal Prep’ section where users can select from precooked and pre portioned meats, grains and vegetables. Users had differing opinions about the details of this section as some wanted to know more information around the ingredients, seasonings and nutritional breakdown. Some users also did not understand that these were extra ingredients until they went to checkout. Our recommendation is that there needs to be more detail as to what this section is so users can understand what they are selecting.
Clip from user study demonstrating navigation.“Has a nice look to it, but has a lot of opportunity for additional information that would make me feel more confident in exactly what I’m getting when I place an order.”
Navigation: The user interface during the selection stage of the process added a layer of complication as the users cart did not automatically scroll with the rest of the page until they neared the end. Our recommendation was to adjust user interface to avoid hiding the total price and requiring extra scrolling that 4 of our 6 users identified as difficult. Users also want more detail overall as they felt that they were ordering blindly based on the lack of overall subscription instructions.
Final Recommendations
From our study, the users were able to navigate throughout the ordering process with little to no issue. However, we observed overall frustration from users because they couldn’t get all the information they wanted, couldn’t select from multiple meal plans, and they couldn’t filter out by allergens. While these hindrances didn’t stop them from being able to complete their tasks, they did create a longing for more information and more choices.
After our user studies, my group and I sorted through our gathered data and created our recommendations. While going through our recommendations, we grouped them by order of severity, critical being something that is a major finding that we see as priority, to minor being something that would be a nice fix but is not crucial in the overall experience. Our main recommendation coming out of this at a critical level was the addition of allergen sorting and ingredient listing as this is something that can be severe to the consumer if unknown.
For future product development, our research supports considering the following:
Change Meal Prep name (possibly Add ons or A la carte) to be clearer what the section means
Adding a menu preview to be shown when hovering over each meal plan.
Adding breakfast options