Enter password to view
Designing a new planning experience to support long-term healthy eating habits
My role
Product Design Lead
Company
ZOE
Year
2024
Background
ZOE is a science-based personalised nutrition company helping people make smarter food choices. A persistent challenge in the programme is sustaining behaviour change over time. Through a diary study, we identified meal planning as the single biggest friction point preventing members from staying on track.
While planning is hard for most people, adding ZOE into the mix introduced further complexity - balancing ZOE-friendly meals with family cooking, translating recommendations into action and maintaining consistency week to week. This led to a central question:
How might we make weekly planning and shopping easier, while integrating them meaningfully into the ZOE programme?
As design lead, I worked with a cross-functional team to create and evolve a new meal planning experience - shipping early iterations, embedding it as a core app feature and prototyping future directions.
Learning from members
I led interviews and a survey with over 1,100 members to understand how meal planning fitted into their lives. Three consistent themes emerged:
Planning is weekly and time-constrained
Most members planned from Friday to Sunday, but struggled to fit planning into already busy routines.
Implication: Planning needed to align with existing weekly habits, without introducing daily overhead or additional cognitive load.
Planning and shopping are cognitively expensive
Members relied heavily on shopping lists, but manually collating ingredients across multiple recipes was time-consuming.
Implication: Reducing effort at the moment of intent was critical to unlocking sustained use.
Effort outweighed perceived value
Members weren’t always sure what to eat to meet weekly goals, and meal logging felt repetitive - particularly for repeat meals.
Implication: Planning needed to replace effort elsewhere in the experience, not add to it.
Defining success and scope
I facilitated workshops with product, engineering, nutrition and coaching partners to align on direction, constraints and measures of success. We prioritised metrics that reflected habit formation:
Adoption: 40% of members add 2+ meals
Retention: 30% plan for 2+ consecutive weeks
Depth: 5+ meals planned per user per week
We committed to shipping a focused first release to learn quickly and iterate in-market.
I led design across two parallel streams:
Design + deliver: Moving from problem framing through MVP delivery via testing and staged releases.
Live + learn: Analysing analytics, in-app feedback and member interviews to guide post-launch iteration.
Running these streams in parallel allowed us to move quickly without over-designing upfront, compounding value through real usage data rather than assumptions.
Enabling confident first plans
To support first-time users, we designed onboarding to help members confidently create their first meal plan without starting from a blank canvas.
Our initial approach pre-populated recipe sets based on dietary preferences. While this reduced effort, members felt constrained by the lack of choice and personal relevance.
In response, we shifted to a more flexible model - surfacing curated recommendations that members actively selected from, including previously saved meals where intent was clear.
This balance of guidance and control significantly increased first-plan conversion, reinforcing the importance of ownership in planning behaviours.
Evolving the planner
The planner enables members to organise their weekly meals while viewing a projected ZOE score, helping them understand how planned meals align with their health goals. This represented a deliberate shift from ZOE’s original scoring model, which only reflected meals already eaten.
To support plan creation, we refined a universal 'add to plan' interaction through multiple iterations. This included a focused recipe carousel featuring saved and recommended meals, alongside seamless access to browsing, searching and filtering the full recipe library.
We also integrated a dynamic shopping list that automatically consolidated ingredients across planned meals, allowing members to view, check off and export their list - directly addressing one of the most cited member pain points.
A core challenge was accommodating varied planning behaviours. Research consistently showed two patterns:
Flexible planners: preferred selecting meals from a general pool
Structured planners: wanted to assign meals to specific days
Our initial structure organised meals by type (e.g. breakfast, dinner), leaning into flexibility while offering optional daily scheduling via the diary. While this approach performed well, ongoing feedback highlighted a need for more integrated day-level planning.
We iterated to support daily scheduling directly within the planner, while retaining an unassigned section for flexibility. This structure better supported diverse behaviours and laid the foundation for future capabilities, including diary auto-population. At the time I left the team, this iteration was in development.
Building up each plan
To support both focused planning and casual browsing, we introduced a universal 'add to plan' action across all recipes, allowing members to build their weekly plan with a single interaction. This significantly improved planning engagement.
We also aligned the meal planning experience to a weekly cadence, collaborating closely with coaching and nutrition partners to reinforce meaningful behaviour change for members.
Planning into weekly action
To make planning more action-oriented, we integrated the meal plan into ZOE’s weekly check-in - a high-intent moment where members reflect on the past week and set goals for the next. A lightweight initial integration drove a significant uplift in engagement, validating the importance of meeting members at the right moment.
Given its impact, I continued to explore and prototype richer personalisation and insight models to help members improve their meals week over week, directly informing the product roadmap.
Planning around ingredients
To address planning based on available ingredients, we introduced an AI-powered recipe generator. Members could input ingredients and receive tailored recipes complete with methods, images and ZOE scores.
Rather than a standalone feature, this closed a key loop in the planning system - helping members move from constraints to action without breaking flow.
Outcome and impact
The meal planning experience exceeded all initial success metrics and became a core surface for driving adherence within the ZOE programme.
As a result, planning was positioned as a foundational component of ZOE’s strategic 'Programs' initiative, supporting long-term dietary change through progressive weekly habits. Ongoing iteration continues to evolve the experience based on member behaviour and feedback.
"This feature made me use ZOE again… The weekly meal plan allows me to plan healthy recipes for me and the whole family. Without this, I’d leave ZOE.”
ZOE member
Previous
Next