Casual Meal — Nutrition App
Project Overview
A responsive nutrition product designed to make recipe discovery and everyday meal planning clearer and more approachable.
My Contribution
My Role
I worked as the UI/UX Designer, leading the product from early discovery through information architecture, interaction design, wireframing, visual design, responsive prototyping, and final delivery.
Project Description
Casual Meal is a cross-platform nutrition app that helps users discover practical recipes, understand nutritional information, and make more informed meal choices.
Project Type
Cross-Platform Product Design
Tools
Figma and Adobe Photoshop.
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My Process
I used a user-centred design process to understand users’ needs, define the product structure, explore solutions, and validate the experience through wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes.
Why This Product Matters
Casual Meal addresses the practical barriers people encounter when trying to maintain healthy eating habits within busy daily routines. The design reduces cognitive load and simplifies decision-making through accessible recipe discovery, clear nutrition content, and straightforward meal-planning flows.
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Obesity in New Zealand
The 2024/25 New Zealand Health Survey, published by the Ministry of Health on 19 November 2025, reported that 34.2% of adults were classified as obese, compared with 31.3% in 2019/20. This evidence highlighted the value of making practical nutrition information easier to access and understand.
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Making Nutritious Choices Easier
The World Health Organization’s healthy-diet guidance, updated on 26 January 2026, identifies minimally processed and unprocessed foods as a foundation of healthy diets and associates diets high in heavily processed foods with negative health outcomes. This finding informed the product’s emphasis on practical home-cooked recipes and understandable nutritional information.
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Cost and time misconception
The common belief that sticking to a nutritious diet is too costly, coupled with the misconception that preparing healthy daily meals takes too much time, underscores the need for solutions that address both time and financial constraints.
User Personas
After evaluating the research findings, I identified several personas who closely represented the product’s intended audience, goals, behaviours, and everyday constraints.
Research
I investigated how conflicting nutrition advice, highly processed food, time pressure, and perceived cost can influence everyday food choices. The findings helped define opportunities for a product that makes recipe discovery and nutrition information easier to understand and act on.
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Competitor Analysis
To understand the market and prepare for deeper research, I analysed several direct and indirect competitors, comparing their content structures, navigation patterns, recipe discovery tools, and nutrition features.
Typography and Colour
I selected accessible typography and a clear colour system to create a calm, modern interface. The visual hierarchy keeps attention on recipes, ingredients, nutritional information, and primary actions while maintaining consistency across web and mobile.
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Wireframing
Once the research was complete, I created wireframes and a low-fidelity prototype to define the information architecture, screen structure, key functionality, and primary user flows before progressing to visual design.
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Prototyping
I designed high-fidelity prototypes for the responsive web platform and mobile app, creating a consistent, user-centred experience across devices and interaction touchpoints.
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Final Outcome
The final result is a clean, intuitive, and responsive digital experience that makes healthy eating feel accessible and achievable. The platform presents easy, quick-to-cook recipes alongside clear nutritional information and supporting statistics, helping users make informed choices without feeling overwhelmed.
Through a user-centred approach, the design simplifies complex information, guides users smoothly through key journeys, and balances clarity with visual engagement. The structured layout, consistent visual system, and responsive design ensure the experience works seamlessly across both web and mobile devices.
Overall, the project successfully translates health and nutrition content into a practical, approachable product that supports awareness, education, and healthier lifestyle choices.
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