Mah'eats
The Product & The Problem
Mah’eats is a mobile app that combines a curated recipe library with on-demand ordering from a small, hand-picked network of local restaurants known for healthy food, built around one core insight: people want to eat healthy consistently, but lack the time or trustworthy options to do so every day.
The problem, in the user’s own words: “I want to eat healthy consistently, but I don’t have the time or energy to cook every day, and when I don’t cook, I have no trustworthy, genuinely healthy option nearby.”
Existing delivery apps offer no nutrition transparency. Restaurants overstate health claims with no accountability. And most “healthy” apps default to a cold, clinical visual language — green, minimal, sterile — that doesn’t match how people actually want to feel about food. Mah’eats set out to solve this without forcing a choice: cook it or order it, same healthy intent, whichever fits the day.
My Role & Contribution
Product Designer, owning the experience end to end across two core user paths — cooking and ordering — for two personas: the Busy Health-Conscious Professional and the Aspiring Home Cook.
Product & IA
Defined the two-section model (Order vs. Recipes) as separate, dedicated spaces rather than a forced cook/order toggle.
Onboarding
Designed a first-run flow (welcome screen, three preference questions, a “Swipe to sauté” slide-to-confirm interaction with a branded veggie-icon animation) not in the original scope, added to properly introduce the brand.
Core flows
Designed the full order flow (browse → detail → cart → address → payment → confirmation) and the recipe flow (browse by cuisine or by ingredients on hand → step-by-step cooking with checkable steps).
Visual identity
Shaped the brand direction: warm, appetite-appealing, indulgent-looking but backed by clean ingredients, deliberately distinct from typical “green = healthy” apps; introduced a hand-drawn line-art vegetable icon system used throughout instead of generic icon libraries.
Navigation model
Restructured the original 3-tab plan (Order/Recipes/History) into a 4-tab dashboard-style structure (Home/Order/Recipes/Profile) after discovering History worked better as a secondary destination, not a primary one.
Key Design Decisions
(Only the ones that mattered.)
Order and Recipes each got their own dedicated space rather than being merged into a single flow, so users don’t have to context-switch out of one mode to access the other.
The original plan had users land on a choice between two tabs. What shipped instead: three quick-access tiles (Recipes by Cuisine, Recipes by Ingredients, Order) plus a progress widget and a recently-viewed strip, giving Ingredients-based search equal visual weight instead of burying it a level deeper inside Recipes.
10 restaurants hand-picked by Mah’eats creators, each with a short “why we picked this” note and health credential tags, reinforcing trust over infinite choice; the cart is intentionally restricted to one restaurant at a time.
Bubblegum pink, deep maroon, and muted gold replace the green-and-white palette most competitors default to, paired with a custom hand-drawn veggie icon set to keep the feel hand-picked rather than templated.
Rather than requiring an exact ingredient match, recipes are scored and surfaced by how few ingredients are missing (0–2), so users get useful results even when they don’t have everything on hand.
The Outcome
(The PRD is written pre/at-launch, so treat these as build-status milestones rather than live performance metrics — swap in real numbers once available.)
10
restaurants curated and seeded across 3 cities
40
recipes live, spanning 9 cuisines
✓
end-to-end order flow — browse → order → track — fully functional, including tipping and a digital receipt
✓
nutrition info live on every recipe and restaurant dish
What’s still open: nutrition-tracking UI exists but isn’t wired to real order/recipe data yet, there’s no real authentication (a per-device ID stands in), and the recipe library sits at 40 vs. a 50-recipe launch target, all flagged transparently in the PRD’s own risk log rather than glossed over.