Matfynd
An app that helps people on a tight budget by planning affordable meals, managing grocery shopping, and recommending recipes.
Background
With rising food prices, many individuals—especially students—struggle to maintain a healthy diet on a budget. Matfynd aims to assist these budget-conscious users by providing tools for meal planning, grocery shopping, and recipe discovery, all within a single platform. Users can compare prices, find discounts, and receive personalized recipe recommendations that fit their financial constraints.
As a student balancing finances and healthy eating myself, I saw the need for an app that integrates price comparison, budgeting, and shopping lists. Matfynd fills this gap, empowering users to make informed choices and avoid overspending on food.
Challenge
The challenge was to create an all-in-one platform that helps users:
Stick to a grocery budget.
Waste less food by tracking pantry items.
Discover recipes tailored to their dietary preferences and financial needs.
Many students often exceed their grocery budgets due to fluctuating food prices and the challenge of finding competitive deals. Additionally, finding recipes that match their dietary restrictions or preferences while staying within budget is often difficult.
Objective
Matfynd focuses on the following:
Budgeting – Helping users manage their grocery spending more effectively.
Price Comparison – Finding the best deals across multiple supermarkets.
Recipe Discovery – Suggesting recipes that cater to both dietary preferences and budget constraints.
Design Process
1. Research
Understanding user needs and market gaps.
2. Strategy
Ideating solutions to identified problems.
3. Design
Translating ideas into wireframes and prototypes.
4. Prototyping & Testing
Building a final prototype and testing it with users.
Research
User Group
We conducted surveys and semi-structured interviews with six students aged 18 to 30, focusing on their grocery shopping habits, meal planning, and budgeting struggles. Through these interactions, we gathered detailed insights into their pain points and prioritized potential features.
Key Findings
Users need a simple way to compare grocery prices across stores.
Managing a food budget is essential but often overlooked by existing apps.
A few struggle with food waste, primarily due to a lack of pantry management.
Users desire recipes that fit both their dietary preferences and tight budgets.
Market Research
Several apps already addressed some of the users’ needs, but none offered a comprehensive solution. For example:
Matpriskollen – Offers price comparisons and recipes but lacks a budget feature.
Pantry – Focuses on meal planning but doesn’t include price comparison or budgeting.
KitchenPal – Offers pantry tracking and recipe suggestions but is difficult to navigate and lacks budget options.
This research highlighted a clear opportunity for Matfynd to offer a combination of price comparison, budgeting and recipes in a more intuitive design.
Existing Apps
Matpriskollen
+ Recipes
+ Shopping list
+ Compare prices
+ Shopping list
+ Pantry tracking
+ Simple design
- Hard to navigate
- No budget options
Pantry
+ Shopping list
+ Pantry tracking
+ Food planning
+ Recipes
- Cluttered design
- No recipes
- No offers or prices
KitchenPal
+ Recipes
+ Meal planner
+ Simple design
- No budget options
- No offers or prices
- No budget options
SmakShare
+ Shopping list
- No budget options
- No offers or prices
2. Strategy
Ideation process
To make sense of the data and determine how to act on it, a brainstorming session was conducted to identify key pain points. We then applied the SCAMPER method to explore potential solutions to the pain points and refine our ideas. This process led us to a product concept that directly addressed the pain points uncovered during the research phase.
Pain Points
1. Food Waste
Food is thrown away because it’s hard to keep track of what is in the pantry.
2. Cooking
It’s hard to come up with new recipes and to find recipes that are based on ones preferences.
3. Economy
More money than is wanted is spent on groceries, leading to difficulties with one’s economy.
4. Deals
It’s hard to find the best deals for groceries when they are promoted on different websites / apps.
5. Unorganized Shopping
Shopping for groceries is stressful due to not having a structured and prepared list of what to buy.
Solutions
1. Pantry Tracker
An app that tracks the food in one’s pantry, fridge and freezer. Solves pain point 1.
2. Recipes
An app that recommends recipes with ingredients within one’s budget. Solves pain points 2 & 3.
3. Food Budget
An app that allows you to create a food budget and keep track of it. Solves pain point 3.
4. Compare Deals
An app that keeps offers from different grocery stores in the same place. Solves pain point 4.
5. Shopping List
An app that allows users to make a shopping list.
Solves pain point 5.
Final Solution
Out of all of these potential solutions, the ones that were chosen for the prototype is 2. Recipes, 3. Food Budget, 4. Compare Deals and 5. Shopping List. All of these solutions could be combined and intertwined, working with each other. See the simple user flow, of how these solutions could work together. Solution 1. Pantry Tracker was not a part of the final solution because only 25% of the users had a need for such a function, whereas 75% had a need for the economic aspects such as budgeting and deals, as well as recipes. This made us take a decision of not incorporating such a function in the prototype, as it would require a lot of resources and time, which we did not have.
3. Design
Wireframes and Prototyping
The user research heavily influenced the design process. Starting with wireframes, we iterated through several versions based on user feedback before moving to a low-fidelity prototype in Figma. We bypassed traditional sketches to focus on rapid digital iteration, ensuring the design stayed aligned with user needs.
Design Inspiration
We drew inspiration from Matpriskollen for its functionality but made significant improvements in terms of usability and simplicity. While Matpriskollen had helpful features, it was often difficult to navigate. We aimed for a more intuitive interface, particularly by adding a budget function and creating a cleaner, less cluttered design.
Visual Design
We experimented with various palettes, eventually selecting a nature-inspired scheme to create a calming experience (the second image to the left among the 5 choices below). This choice was driven by discussions with users who favored a calming, organic look that felt reliable and inviting. However, after user feedback about contrast issues, we made further adjustments to ensure better visibility and usability of key elements, such as buttons.
4. Prototyping & Testing
Testing Feedback
We tested the prototype with users from our target group- students aged 18 - 30. We began by giving testers a brief overview of the app’s purpose: helping them plan meals, compare grocery prices, and manage their food budgets. They were then allowed to explore the app without guidance to assess the intuitiveness of the interface.
+ Good icons in the menu
+ Aesthetically pleasing design
+ Good images
- Adding ingredients to the shopping list from a recipe is unclear
- The images on the recipe categories are confusing
- The “budget streak“ symbols are confusing
Changes
Based on the feedback, the prototype was altered in order to suit the final users’ wants and needs. Some changes that were made based on the feedback was simplifying the recipe categories and changing the ambiguous images in the budget streak. These changes are shown below.
Conclusion
This project taught me the value of integrating continuous user feedback into the design process. By focusing on the core pain points of our target users, we were able to build a solution that empowers the users to make informed decisions about their food spending and meal planning. Moving forward, further testing would focus on improving usability and expanding features to cater to a wider range of dietary preferences.