Case study · COGS 127 · UC San Diego
Extending Instacart with a budget-aware meal planner
Young adults are having difficulty budgeting their grocery money for the week, let's make sure they don't overspend.
- My role
- UI/UX Designer & Researcher
- Timeline
- Spring 2026
- Tools
- Figma, FigJam
My contributions
- Designed multiple ways to reach the new budgeting widget — from the home screen and from within a specific grocery store
- Created multiple iterations of the dietary preferences page
- Conducted user research
- Helped build the user flows
- Drew my part of the hand-drawn low-fidelity sketches
- Prototyped the final product
Problem statement
Rising grocery costs and busy schedules make meal planning difficult, leaving many people uncertain about what to cook and concerned about overspending on groceries.
Goals
- Simplify meal planning
- Help users stay within budget while grocery shopping
- Enhance Instacart's value for budget conscious shoppers
- Increase confidence in user purchasing decisions
Competitive analysis
My team conducted a competitive analysis of several grocery and meal-planning platforms, including HelloFresh, Too Good To Go, and Thrive Market, to identify features that could improve the grocery shopping experience. We evaluated each platform's strengths and limitations and explored opportunities to incorporate valuable features into an existing grocery delivery service such as Instacart.
HelloFresh provides users with curated meal recipes and pre-portioned ingredients, helping reduce the effort required for meal planning. However, users have limited flexibility in modifying included ingredients and seasonings, and the service does not currently accept EBT payments.
TooGoodToGo focuses on affordability and sustainability by connecting users with discounted surplus food from local businesses. While the platform helps users save money and reduce food waste, food selections are often limited and may come as surprise bags with only general descriptions of their contents.
Thrive Market offers a wide selection of pantry staples, frozen foods, and specialty dietary products at discounted prices. While it excels at providing affordable grocery options, it offers limited fresh produce compared to traditional grocery delivery services.
Through this analysis, we identified three key opportunities for Instacart: integrating meal-planning support, improving budget-conscious shopping options, and helping users discover affordable grocery alternatives while maintaining the flexibility to choose their own products. These insights informed the development of our proposed meal-planning extension.
User research
Through user interviews, we discovered that budget concerns heavily influenced grocery shopping decisions. Participants consistently prioritized affordability and often second-guessed purchases out of fear of exceeding their budget.
Time constraints also played a significant role in meal planning behavior. Limited time reduced how often participants were able to plan meals or shop for groceries, leading them to rely on whatever ingredients were available at home. As a result, meals became less intentional, repetitive, and often less balanced. Participants also struggled to create meals that felt both filling and nutritious while staying within budget. Many felt forced to sacrifice nutritional quality in order to purchase enough food to meet their needs.
Pain points
Users struggled most with:
- Keeping track of spending while shopping
- Planning groceries consistently with limited time
- Creating meals that feel complete within a limited budget
Wishes and desires
Users wanted to see:
- Clear visibility into how much they are spending in real time
- Support in building affordable but filling meals
- A more efficient and less stressful planning process
Solution
To address users' concerns around budgeting and meal planning, we designed a budget-aware meal planning feature for Instacart. The feature helps users build affordable, filling meals while tracking costs in real time, making grocery shopping more efficient, less stressful, and financially predictable.
Usability findings & iterations
Finding
Participants responded positively to both budget widget concepts. They appreciated the detailed spending information in the larger widget while also valuing the smaller widget's reduced visual footprint.
Solution
We created a hybrid design that combines the visibility of the larger concept with a more compact layout, and moved the widget closer to the bottom of the screen to improve thumb reachability while browsing meals.
Finding
Participants preferred a simpler approach to dietary preferences and suggested adding cuisine-based filtering. Earlier designs used dedicated screens with large visual elements.
Solution
The final design condenses these selections into a compact filter menu on the browse meals page, creating a more streamlined experience without adding extra steps to the flow.