My MealMate – Lily Wang

MealMate

How might we make employee experiences fun and engaging in order to enhance their satisfaction and be personally vested in the company?

SUMMERY

I designed a company internal app for employees to be connected over a company-provided lunch.

CLIENT

Constellation Brands

RESPONSIBILITY

User Research
UX/UI Design
Prototyping

DURATION

3 months

HIGHTLIGHT 1

Monday Pairing

Monday is when employees usually plan out their weekly work schedule. To reduce friction when pairing for MealMate, the users are matched ahead of time every Monday for Tuesday to Friday lunch, so they can coordinate and plan ahead.

HIGHLIGHT 2

Random or Interests

Users have the option of having a random match or getting pair up with mealmate that share common interests. The app will provide a prompt when the pair happen that can be a nice ice breaker.

HIGHTLIGHT 3

Connection Recap

Every pairing is saved to the profile to enable users to establish a deeper connection after the meal. A recap provides users statics like department breakdown and overall ratings.

HIGHTLIGHT 4

Feedback Data

A feedback form is provided after each meal to help the company understand if MealMate contributes to employees' satisfaction further help the company grow.

BACKGROUND

As a Fortune 500 company, Constellation Brands holds the third-largest market share for supplying beer and is the largest beer importer in the US. Surprisingly, as a company that sells party essential, the company culture doesn't appear as excited as the product to their employees. Moreover, the voluntary turnover rate has seemed to be increasing.

TARGET AUDIENCE

We started by conducting stakeholder interviews with our client Michael Thaney who gave us an overview of the company. It was quickly apparent that the job functions vary so much from farmers growing grapes and creating wine brands to line workers bottling Corona to the office financial wizards conducting meetings and signing papers. It was clear that we need to narrow down our target audience in order to come up with an effective, focused solution. We started by creating our Value Proposition Canvas, which help us concluded that we need to group employees not by the department but their day to day activities as this feature will have the most commonality. After some team sprint exercises, we decided to focus on office employees as our target audience because of the potential of scalability.

INSIGHTS

In order to get a clearer insights into the problem, we conducted lean interviews with ten potential users to understand office employees' difficulties in feeling connected to the company. We discovered some common insights across the board:

80% of the interviewees would be more inclined to stay with the company longer if they had more friends.

Not all employees need to speak to each other but having in-person communication is effective in making employees feel valued.

When it comes to inner-company dialogue, “keeping it real” and authenticity is key rather than forced get-together.

IDEATION

From the insights we gained, our team ideated 50 solutions. After obtaining feedback from our client and undergoing risk assessment, we ultimately landed on the idea that we have named MealMate. The goal of MealMate is to enable employees to connect more naturally and efficiently. It avoids awkward ice breaker games, happy hours where employees chat with the same people every time and takes you to the most common cultural gathering event - a meal.

EXPERIMENT

To test this solution, we ran a pilot at Constellation Brands where we manually paired up 40 employers to have lunch together. Using a pre-survey to ask about basic information like their interests, job title, and years in the company. Then use those data to pair people up. An email was sent a week earlier to notify the test subjects about the pairing and gave them a time frame to have lunch together. 91% of the employees who were matched actually went to lunch. The employees then were asked to take a post-survey for us to gather feedback. We concluded four takeaways:

Employees prefer to coordinate with their MealMate and pick which restaurant to dine in by themselves rather we assign it to them.

Everyone has a different schedule, so “time" should be the first thing to consider when pairing people up.

Matching employees with their interest and providing the reason why they are matched is a good prompt for starting a conversation.

Employees prefer to be matched with someone further removed from their department.

UX SOLUTIONS

After the experiement, I am able to map out the structure of the app. I first hand sketched a low-fi prototype, from here it was a back and forth of testing and refining. Until the flow is well established I moved to figma to create a high-fi prototype.

FUTURE ITERATION

Including calendar/scheduling features
Group 3 or 4 people together
Expand to virtual MealMate allowing connection from a different location
Integration into internal HR applications