This application is designed to make meal planning for families easier with a straightforward interface that provides all of the resources that go into planning meals on a weekly basis. Many families often have very busy schedules that often conflict with each other so providing an application that takes the difficulty out of juggling schedules so planning family meal time can be easier. The app lays out a meal schedule for the week and gives details about what the meal is, who will be able to attend the meal, and the different responsibilities that go into meal preparation as well as clean up afterwards.

For this project we were tasked with creating an application that helps make life at home better. There were a large variety of different projects because students were able to pick between improving your life at home with your family or living with friends in a house at school. This allowed us to get creative with our solution because many of the problems that we were solving for were problems that we have experienced. For my application, I decided to create an interface that helps families plan weekly dinners because over the summer and during the fall when I lived at home for my Co-Op, it was often hard for my family to have dinner together because of busy conflicting schedules. In my family, we also rotate who makes dinner because both of my parents work and my siblings and I are capable of making dinner so it makes the most sense to take turns. By making an app where you can easily find recipes across the web and add them to the weekly schedule makes the entire process simpler.

For this project, most of the research was from prior experience along with valdation through in class peer-reviews. This application was solving for a fairly specific problem, but a problem that many families have faced. I used the issues that had come up in the past with planning meals for my own family to drive many of the solutions. During our class time, we would be constantly working with each other to help validate and critique each other's application designs. Since this was our final project of the semester, we also had an official peer-review day where we walked around the room and critiqued everyone's app solution. The instructor also gave everyone direct feedback, and because he has 3 kids, his suggestions were especially helpful.

When preparing to design this application, I used some inspiration from a few different applications to create a clean and simple interface. I decided that the main page of the app should be the weekly calendar because that is where the user can go to see what is being made for each meal for every day of the week. I also liked the idea of having a tab at the bottom that is always accessible throughout the app with a grocery list would be convenient and would allow the user to add and keep track of the groceries that they will need for the week. There would also be a "Pantry" section which allows the user to keep track of what they already have at their house so if they are low on a specific ingredient when picking a recipe for the week, the application could prompt them to add it to their grocery list.

Early wireframes and sitemap of meal planning application.