Company
WeightWatchers
Role
UX Design Manager
Year
2020
Browsing Recipes
Every day, WW members face the same question: What should I have for dinner?
Many turned to the WW app for inspiration that fit their daily Points budget, but research revealed the experience wasn’t meeting their needs. Members struggled to find budget-friendly, seasonal meals and wished for an easier way to bring in recipes from outside sources.
Project Process
Through research, we uncovered two key opportunities: highlight affordable, seasonal recipes and enable URL imports. These insights shaped a simpler, more personalized recipe experience. I partnered across product and design to prototype, test, and refine a solution that streamlined meal discovery and set the stage for future enhancements.
Project Themes
Workshop Exploration
We brought together teammates from Science, Engineering, and Customer Support for a workshop to surface pain points and explore ideas that would make recipe tracking simpler and more intuitive.
Using FigJam, we collected feedback, mapped constraints, and then synthesized the findings into key insights that informed a new conceptual direction.
In the absence of a dedicated PM, design helped drive prioritization—aligning with engineering leads to shape the feature roadmap and rollout.
With a small team balancing multiple priorities, even modest improvements required thoughtful coordination and pacing.
Multi-Phase project
Originally, the saved recipes page was a simple list without showing each recipe’s Points value.
In the first phase, we refreshed the page to align with the updated WW brand, leveraging new components from the design system team—specifically, the recently released card carousel.
In the following phase, we introduced recipe imports via URL, enabling members to quickly add meals and portion details directly to their food tracking flow.
Product Vision
But, we hadn’t solved for the entire JTBD, which drove additional thinking about the future for tracking a meal.
What’s in your fridge?
Project Impact
Impact
We designed a feature that surfaced popular, seasonal, and budget-friendly recipes, while also allowing members to import recipes via URL. In testing, this streamlined approach reduced friction and better supported members in planning and tracking meals.
Looking forward, additional research pointed to future opportunities: enabling recipe sharing within and beyond the WW community, and delivering personalized recommendations based on past tracking behavior. These insights shaped the long-term feature vision.