Meal Mates
An app and service to bring housemates together
Design Brief
Design for socail connection amongst gen Z
Duration
6 weeks
Role
Lead UI & UX Designer
Context
What is Meal Mates?
Meal Mates is an affordable meal prep service designed for students living together. It makes group cooking simple by letting housemates plan meals, split costs automatically, and follow recipes that divide tasks fairly. With built-in prompts to spark conversation, Meal Mates turns everyday dinners into fun, social experiences that strengthen bonds at home.
Problem
Gen Z Often Feel Loanly in Student Accommodation
Many Gen Z students living in shared accommodation experience weak social bonds with their housemates, leading to loneliness, miscommunication, and wasted resources like uneaten food. This insight became the foundation of our project.
Solution
A Meal Kit Service That Brings Housemates Together
Meal mates combines food sharing and group cooking to bring students together, reduce waste, and create meaningful social moments.
Group meals
Split payments
Personalised recipes & Icebreakers
Impact
Many Gen Z students living in shared accommodation can experience weak social bonds with their housemates and feel unwelcome in communal spaces such as kitchens, leading to loneliness, miscommunication, and wasted resources like uneaten food. A service like Meal Mates could have a huge impact on this problem.
1
Stronger social bonds
2
Improved communication
3
Balanced time, tasks, and spend
4
Reduced food waste
But... how did we get here?
Accenture ran this project with us over six weeks and provided the opening brief: “Design for social connection amongst Gen Z.” The brief was very open-ended, so my group and I explored the problem space in depth, using research and discovery to identify meaningful opportunities.
Research and discovery
What are the barriers to Gen Z socialising?
Through Secondary research, observation and 10 user interviews were conducted to understand the problem space and pain points. Below are the key findings.
Cost making things inaccessible
Gen Z tends to prefer low-cost or free social environments. High prices at clubs, events, or festivals often discourage participation.
Last minute cancellations & Flakiness
Last minute cancellations and flakiness from others are a common barrier to maintaining social plans, leading to frustration and disconnection.
When one becomes the organiser
Planning social activities often falls on a single person, which can become mentally exhausting and discouraging over time.
Feeling unwelcome in shared spaces
When people feel unwelcome or uncomfortable in shared spaces like the kitchen, they often avoid them, which prevents the area from serving as a natural hub for bonding and instead shuts down opportunities for casual, spontaneous social interaction.
How might we reimagine communal spaces to spark collaboration and strengthen bonds between people living together?
Design Prompt
Chosen Concept
Meal Mates
We decided to merge the strongest elements of our concepts into a new Meal Mates approach. This concept combines food sharing and group cooking to bring students and young adults together, reduce waste, and create meaningful social experiences.
Competitive analysis
When brainstorming design ideas and solutions, I analysed other existing meal prep services that have similar user needs and design patterns such as Hello Fresh and Drop Chef
Service blueprint
How the service would work
Meal Mates builds on the familiar meal kit model but is designed for shared living. Instead of one person organising everything, housemates can pool into a single order with costs split automatically through the app. Recipes divide tasks fairly, while fun prompts keep the mood lively. By turning cooking into a collaborative, social event, Meal Mates helps strengthen household bonds.
Prototyping and Testing
Scenario Prototype
We did two main types of prototyping, prototyping the scenario and prototyping the app.
First we had to test if getting strangers to cook together actually created a positive social connection and brought them closer together. So we took two people who never met and brought them together to cook in one of UCDs student accommodations. We gave them the ingredients and instructions and Observed.
Niamh
Esther
Insight 1.
What we heard
“Once we sat down, it was like... now what?” — Esther
What it means
The shared activity of cooking helped break the ice, but when the task ended, participants didn’t know how to keep the interaction going. This caused an awkward energy drop during the meal.
What we did
We added light conversation prompts and fun, optional icebreakers in the app for the meal-time phase, helping users continue bonding while they eat.
Insight 2.
What we saw
Many students felt awkward assigning roles when cooking with new people.
What it means
Without clear task distribution, shared cooking can feel unbalanced or stressful.
What we did
We added a feature that assigns suggested roles during group cooking sessions to reduce friction and build confidence.
The scenario prototype was a success and we got alot of possitive feedback from the participants, we also learned from observations what are the painpoints and alkward moments in group cooking and this informed some of the features of our app and service.
Quotes
“I was really fun, and turned what’s usually a chore into a fun activity ~ Esther
“Me and my housemates avoid each other, If you hear someone in the kitchen you will wait till their gone to go in, I do like them but its just awkward but I think something like this could really help”~ Niamh
App Prototype
We created paper prototypes and conducted multiple rounds of testing, iterating each version based on user feedback.
Insight 1.
Users appreciate the recipe gallery, but they need clearer information about portion sizes, difficulty, and dietary suitability for a group.
Insight 2.
Users need transparency in shared payment to avoid confusion or awkwardness about splitting costs.
Insight 3.
Users want contextual chat for each meal so conversations don’t get lost in general group chat.
Insight 4.
The recipe step-by-step layout with photos made cooking easier, as instructions felt digestible and visually guided.
Final Designs
This screen is designed to give users a quick shared living feel more connected and efficient.
1/ Home screen
This screen is designed to give users a quick overview of their activity and promote continued engagement with the app.
2/Meal kits
This series of screens is designed to guide users through proposing, organizing, and confirming a shared meal, making group cooking simple, social, and hassle-free.
3/Proposing a meal
This series of screens is designed to guide users through proposing, organizing, and confirming a shared meal, making group cooking simple, social, and hassle-free.
4/Recipe group chat
This series of screens is designed to guide users through proposing, organizing, and confirming a shared meal, making group cooking simple, social, and hassle-free.
Due to time constraints, we weren’t able to fully develop certain parts of the app. If given more time, I would focus on refining the onboarding process, ensuring new users quickly understand how to join or create a household, pool into meal plans, and split payments seamlessly. A smoother onboarding flow would be essential to lowering barriers to entry and encouraging students to adopt Meal Mates with ease.
Next steps
1/Importance of scenario prototyping
Scenario prototyping proved invaluable. By placing our concept into realistic, everyday situations, we could see how users might actually interact with the service beyond the interface. It helped us uncover social dynamics we wouldn’t have spotted in static wireframes, like moments of awkwardness after cooking together. This showed me how important scenario based methods can be for designing services that fit naturally into people’s lives.
2/Clarity beats complexity
Students responded best to simple, intuitive flows rather than overloaded screens.
Learnings
