From Hello Fresh to Hello Vegan
The world is increasingly asking for a switch to more vegan and plant-based meal options. Let’s give it to them!
A couple of days ago, I was asked to make a huge design sprint and conceptualize in a matter of hours a potential image for Hello Vegan, a sub-brand from Hello Fresh.
Team Size: Individual
Tools: Figma
Deliverables: Landing page, Interactive prototype, presentation
Duration: 5h
1. Previous Research
Hello Fresh is a German publicly traded meal-kit company based in Berlin, Germany. It is the largest meal-kit provider in the United States, and also has operations in Canada, Western Europe, New Zealand, Sweden and Australia.
Once we’ve understood the nature of the company we need to design a fictional solution for, the next step would be to find out what other players are on that market niche.
COMPETITOR’S BENCHMARK
The competitor’s benchmark was further divided into 2 subsections: direct competitors of Hello Fresh and competitors for Hello Vegan — the product line that would only sell vegan and plant-based meal kits — .
This benchmark was very helpful in order to understand how the user flow worked inside each of these apps and websites, since we would later have to replicate it for our own.
We also looked for some visual inspiration, in order to understand what are the current trends that other designers are following while designing food-related apps.
2. Ideating the landing page
The first challenge consisted in designing an alternative to the hello fresh landing page to advertise/include Hello Vegan.
In order to do this, we tried to follow their style guides and include the Hello Vegan introductory section somewhere where it wasn’t too intrusive for the non-vegan users of Hello Fresh.
Since Hello Vegan would be a new line, we wanted it to follow the same color combinations, but we would use it in another way, prioritizing green instead of orange, and playing around with blobs and shapes.
3. Conceptualizing the App
Once again, since we had very little time to finish this challenge, we had to skip the ordinary steps for this process — paper prototype, wireframing, testing and iterating — , and directly jump to the Hi-Fi version of the app.
Nonetheless, we benchmarked the main screens with the parent brand — Hello Fresh — to see how they were doing the whole user flow.
We were asked to design a maximum of 5 screens with the main features of the app. In this case, we chose:
- The initial search screen
- The search screen showing some results
- The “my meals” screen
- And the profile screen
Learnings & Next Steps
The whole challenge was super interesting to carry out, since I was able to work first-hand in a changing industry such as the food delivery one. Veganism is not only a trend, but a sustainable movement that is increasing in our society, and each of us needs to understand what it implies and the whole universe of possibilities it could include. And, indeed, due to a (short) experience as a vegan, and surrounding myself with vegan and veggie people, I understand, and I am aware that there are thousands of options out there for non-meat meals. And my role as a designer and evangelist for a more sustainable way of eating is to make all of those options available to everyone, and to portray them as sexy. Veganism is not only salads and fruit, it has a whole world of combinations and tastes.
With a little bit more time, I would like to test it in the market and slow down the whole design process. This is essential in case the project was for real, and we had to understand how our users would actually use the app.
If you have any comments on how to improve it, please let me know!
