Platted
Meal planning that starts from what is already in your fridge.
Every food app assumes you are starting from an empty fridge. Platted starts from what you already own.
Platted
Meal planning that starts from what is already in your fridge.
Read the full case study on Behance↗RESEARCH THROUGH TO HIGH FIDELITY · THE COMPLETE DECKTHE BETEvery food app assumes you are starting from an empty fridge. Platted starts from what you already own.
Platted is a meal-planning ecosystem that bridges health goals, grocery needs and what is actually in your fridge. It was never meant to be another food app. It was a deep dive into how people decide what to eat, shop and cook under pressure, and how design can take some of that pressure off.
Help people eat well without it becoming work. Personalised meal plans, calorie tracking, smart grocery management and a fridge scan, arranged so that staying consistent is the easy option rather than the disciplined one.
Product design, end to end. Research, information architecture, wireframes, UI, prototype and usability testing.
Figma · Illustrator · Photoshop
Platted is a meal-planning ecosystem that bridges health goals, grocery needs and what is actually in your fridge. It was never meant to be another food app. It was a deep dive into how people decide what to eat, shop and cook under pressure, and how design can take some of that pressure off.
Help people eat well without it becoming work. Personalised meal plans, calorie tracking, smart grocery management and a fridge scan, arranged so that staying consistent is the easy option rather than the disciplined one.
Product design, end to end. Research, information architecture, wireframes, UI, prototype and usability testing.
Figma · Illustrator · Photoshop
Nobody is short of recipes.
You already own the food
People overbuy, forget what is in the fridge, and throw it out. Nothing tracks what a household already has, so every meal decision starts again from zero.
Planning is a chore, so nobody does it
Meal planning feels overwhelming and boring. People fall back on Notes apps, Instagram saves or memory, and none of those survive a bad week.
The tools do not talk to each other
Recipes live in one app, the list in another, the fridge in neither. People switch between Instamart, Zepto, Blinkit and BigBasket to finish one meal.
The decision at seven in the evening is the product. Everything else is a database.
01
Start from the fridge, not the recipe.
Mealime, PlateJoy, MealBoard and Cook Smarts all open by asking what you want to eat. Platted opens by asking what you already have. A scan turns the contents of a fridge into the input, so suggestions run against reality instead of an empty cupboard. It also aims at the feeling underneath the problem, which is guilt about waste rather than a shortage of ideas.
02
One thing at a time.
Setup asks for one thing per screen: profile, then BMI, then goals, then meals. It is slower on paper and it tested better, because it cut how much a person had to hold in their head at once. The BMI step does something quieter too. It makes the personalisation visible early, so the plan that arrives later reads as earned rather than generic.
03
The recipe is the shopping list.
The gap I kept hitting was between deciding and buying. So the recipe screen carries its ingredients with quantities and prices, and each one joins a grocery list in a tap. This was the single most-liked thing in testing. It is not a feature bolted onto a recipe app. It is the reason to open one.
Four things I got wrong.
People could not tell if it had saved
After submitting BMI or nutrition goals nothing confirmed it. Users expected a Saved state, and its absence made them distrust the setup they had just finished.
Nobody could find the weight-loss goal
It existed. It was not where a single person went looking for it.
Input and output looked unconnected
People could not see how their allergies and preferences had changed the suggestions, so the personalisation did not read as personalisation.
Two planners read as one screen
Meal Planner and Party Planner sat too close in layout and tone, so it was unclear which was for a Tuesday and which was for fifteen guests.
The structured start cut cognitive load, and one thing per screen was the most repeated compliment. Party Planner was the feature people called genuinely new. Shopping straight from a recipe was the most-liked link in the app.
The order of the screens was tested before any of it was coloured.
Mid fidelity, tested for flow. Colour, type and the fridge scan only went on once the order of the screens held up.
It stopped at a tested prototype. The findings are the build list.
Two weeks, solo, research through to high fidelity. Four problems surfaced in testing, and they are exactly where I would start again.