Planning + Prepping a Meal

if you’re hosting a gathering of friends and family, you are probably creating the meal, know guests preferences, have a location, etc

There’s a number of micro challenges that can easily get lost in the shuffle when one hosts something as seemingly simple as a family dinner. Such as:

This guest is vegan but the message indicates that the recipe is vegan. Nothing to worry about here.

Click the greyed out guests.

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Options available to make the recipe gluten free.

Select Gluten Free Pizza.

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List of guests with dietary restrictions.

Red circled guests are not able to eat the selected recipe. Green circled guests are able to eat the recipe.

Click substitute, you can make the meal safe for everyone.

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Substitute menu pops up. Dietary restriction and guests that are affected are highlighted. Order is from left-to-right.

Greyed out guests are not affected by, in this instance, Gluten.

Click greyed out guest(s) to see their restrictions.

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Now all guests are green circled and therefore safe to eat the meal.

Congratulations.

Arrangements are Complete

HAVA helps people plan cohesive gatherings and keep better track of guests and dietary needs. 

There’s a lot of pressure on what to cook and how much. On top of that is the time investment, constant decision making, invitations, and decorating.

Needing to also remember the details of each guests dietary needs should be a thing of the past.

with HAVA, it is.

What Can You Eat?

Our research + interviews told us that respecting dietary restrictions was one of the, if not the, main concerns for people hosting a meal.

The problem is that many recipe and planning apps do not have flexible options to cater to people’s restrictions. If you, for instance, find a great risotto recipe but one of your guests is vegan, it’s time consuming and difficult to find a comparable vegan recipe. Usually you just have to figure out the substitutions yourself and possibly end up with a substandard meal.

Enter HAVA, a gathering and meal planning mobile experience which allows you to see which of your guests have dietary restrictions, which guests are affected by a recipe, and it provides options to quickly make each recipe safe for all guests.

Design of Substitution Feature

Feature Prioritization Matrix

Now that we knew that dietary restrictions were high priority for hosts, that clearly became the focus of our features matrix. We knew if we could nail that it we could have a minimum viable product that stood out within the millions recipe and planning sites.