By Shradha
Consumer
Food Ordering App
Role UX Design Lead
End-to-End UX · Product Strategy · Design Systems · User Research
Context
Busy professionals, students, and families increasingly struggle to cook at home due to time constraints and demanding routines. As a result, everyday food choices often shift toward convenience over health, impacting long-term well-being.
Maaish was envisioned as a home-cooked food ordering platform that connects consumers with independent home chefs - enabling access to fresh, healthy meals on a recurring basis. The challenge was not just food ordering, but designing an experience that supports repetition, trust, and ease for daily use.
Problem
Early exploration revealed that existing food ordering experiences were optimized for one-off restaurant orders, not for users who needed frequent, repeat meals with minimal effort during busy routines.
Why Existing Food Ordering Apps Don't Work for Daily Use
Discovery & Research approach
To understand user needs and align them with business goals, I led a structured discovery phase combining competitive analysis, user research, and stakeholder alignment. As the sole designer, I owned the entire research process and translated insights into actionable design strategy.
Research Goals & Methods
Based on user research, I created user personas for different user groups for the app , and continued with their journey maps to help understand their tasks to reach end result on the app.
Key pain points identified -
I organized the data to summarize the pain points and insights from user research.
Time to order
Manual entry
Repeat order
Food search
"Hard to find the food item in the menu"
"Cannot go to restaurant everytime"
"Enter each detail everytime is long process"
"Want to quickly repeat the same"
Insights
- Provide filter and search food option to narrow down search
- Repeat order and recent searches option
- Save and autofill the information
- Easy to navigate food items
I continued with stakeholders sessions to proritize the insights and determine he user flow to come up with information architecture of the app. I did paper wireframing followied by low fidelity digital wireframe.
Then came the part to decide on the look and feel of the app. I created the visual identity in consistency with brand guidelines and aligning with company's vision for the product.
Also, a main part was to consider accessibility and making sure the design is inclusive of all users. I made sure the design meets the WCAG accessibility criterias.
We conducted usability study for low fidelity prototype, and the findings were implemented to high fidelity design.
Finally, I created the high fidelity design and shared it with the set of users to incorporate the final feedback.
Usability study : Feedback 1 - Recent searches and repeat orders should be easy to locate
is the link to final prototype
