Meals On Wheels Mobile App

Meals On Wheels delivers over 220 million meals to 2.4 million seniors each year, but meal delivery is only part of the service volunteers provide. Frequent in-home visits provide unique opportunities to meet nutritional needs, combat social isolation, address safety hazards, and provide overall welfare checks.

Project Objective

We were tasked with designing a mobile web or app-based interface that allows volunteers to quickly enter information regarding the client’s health, well being, or other concerns.

We found out they already had an app.

We found out they didn’t use the app.

My Role

Assisted with all parts of the project including:

Took Point On

  • High Fidelity design

  • Make final design choices for high fidelity prototypes and keep the design consistent and at a professional level

  • Research

  • Interviews

  • Site Visits

  • Information Synthesis

  • Ideation

  • Sketching

  • Wireframing

  • Low-Fidelity Design

  • Mid-Fidelity Design

  • Artifact Design

Research

Many of the volunteers were not aware there was an app available to facilitate the delivery and reporting. Some indicated that they were told at the beginning of their volunteer service, but that the subject wasn’t revisited again. Finally, many of the volunteers were age 60 and older and weren’t in the habit of using apps for their daily business, and with the lack of promotion and functionality, they let us know that it just wasn’t practical for them to use one.

To find out why, we contacted them, interviewed them in person, talking with volunteers and staff.

At the same time as the interviews, we conducted a C&C analysis of other meal delivery companies. Meals On Wheels is unique because it is a non-profit company and depends on volunteers instead of paid delivery personnel. With that understanding, there were not the same type of premium features or services you might expect from other meal delivery services like complete meal customization, expedited delivery or premium ingredients. Meals On Wheels’ focus was completely different because it was on the well being of the client along with the meal drop-off.

We wanted to do more research and found a local hub was close by, so we set up a visit with the staff to get more information. We did an on-site visit, ride along and conducted a contextual inquiry. This netted us valuable information from staff and volunteers on how they work, what issues they face and how they go about making deliveries.

We were there for the start of the process to finish which included:

  • Meal delivery

  • Placing meal bags in appropriate numbered locations according to delivery routes

  • Using printed info sheets to determine route and client needs

  • Verifying client meals and packing up food

  • Driving to client

  • Delivering food and evaluating physical and mental conditions

  • Returning to Meals On Wheels to return meal bags and report any client information

We also took the opportunity to speak with the volunteers about the current app, what they would like to see in an app, and what they thought of some ideas we had brainstormed about a potential app.

We found out that they didn’t use the app, didn’t know that there even was one, or that it was mentioned once and never pushed again.

We also asked them what features they might like to see. We had brainstormed a few features and asked about those. We made assumptions about those features, those assumptions were confirmed by the volunteers 

 

Key Insights

  • Volunteers didn’t know there was an app

  • They liked the ideas for features that we presented to them (route navigation, information reporting)

    Volunteers gave us ideas for features like:

  • Volunteer to volunteer communication

  • Reporting on the physical/mental condition of clients

  • Reporting if meals were not delivered

  • The ability to let staff know they would have to miss a delivery shift, and give that shift to another volunteer

We developed a proto persona

From our research and contextual inquiry we were able to come up with a proto-persona that incorporated the needs as well as pain points of the users we were designing for. Meet Barbara.

Meet Barbara

How we incorporated feedback into our design

First, we used the feedback from the staff and volunteers to inform our low fidelity sketches.

Turn by turn navigation

To assist with getting to clients quickly.

Reporting Client issues

The ability to send notes with predetermined common reporting issues.

Contact List

Ability to contact Staff and other volunteers directly.

We conducted User Testing with the low fidelity mockups and revised them based on the feedback that we received. Users were unsure of how to use the list and map screens, and what the purpose of each really was. Testers let us know that they also didn’t have any method for contacting other volunteers, or the local headquarters. So, we went back to the drawing board to flesh out an option for contacting each group.

After synthesizing the data from our low fidelity designs and paper testing we then moved on to our revised mid-fidelity digital designs.

After testing with the mid-fidelity prototype, we moved on to a high fidelity digital design and set up a prototype with those designed screens. We had to dedicate a lot of time to the issues that we had resolved, and how to make those refinements in the high fidelity designs. We ultimately came up with a product that brought our users needs into a cohesive package that looks nice, but ultimately is very usable for the persona that we created.

Outcomes

We ultimately were happy with the results of our digital product and how we were able to incorporate our users’ needs into the digital prototype. We took the understanding of the user’s needs and made that the focus of our end product.

Learning to take user feedback and let that guide our design decision was an incredible learning experience. We really had to refer back to the user often to help solve the problems that came up during our different ideation and design phases, and constantly use that information to inform our designs and tailor them to the user.

We had to handle this project a little differently than a typical UX project. We did a bit more of a lean process, in terms of presenting features to the client and seeing if those would be useful, rather than finding that information out first and then including it. While this wasn’t the “typical” way of doing things, for us on this project, it was perfect.

Next Steps

It would be beneficial to flesh out the in-app messaging system for volunteers to be able to message one another in addition to a phone call. 

We would like to add some route customization so that volunteers could leverage the info about the client’s meals and sort the route so have the frozen meals delivered first to keep them as cold as possible.