Tiffin

A personal project exploring how weekly food planning and scheduled delivery can reduce decision fatigue and improve everyday eating habits.

problem

Deciding what to eat every day is a small but recurring source of stress. Most food delivery apps optimize for choice and discovery, resulting in endless scrolling, shallow recommendations, and decision paralysis. For people with busy routines, this leads to skipped meals, unhealthy choices, or frustration with the ordering experience. Existing platforms focus on on-demand delivery but do not support planning meals in advance or reducing daily cognitive effort. This project started from a personal need to simplify everyday food decisions.

solution

Tiffin is a weekly meal planning and ordering experience designed to work within existing food delivery apps. Instead of choosing food every day, users can plan meals for the entire week and receive scheduled deliveries. The product shifts food ordering from a reactive habit to a planned routine, prioritizing predictability, flexibility, and control.

Designing for decision fatigue, not discovery

Most food apps are designed for exploration. Tiffin was designed for relief.

The core idea was to remove repetitive decision making by allowing users to:

Plan meals once for the week
Customise, reschedule, or cancel meals easily
Receive food automatically at chosen times

Rather than introducing a new brand, the concept was intentionally designed as a feature that could integrate into existing platforms like Zomato or Swiggy.

User Understanding

Based on early exploration, two key user types emerged:

Working professionals returning to office routines
Individuals living away from home with limited time to plan meals

Despite different lifestyles, both groups shared a common need: reliable meals without daily effort.

Key Design Principles

Plan once, eat stress-free all week
Flexibility without rethinking decisions daily
Personalisation driven by habits, not trends

These principles guided feature prioritisation and flow design.

Core Features

Weekly menu planning in advance
Scheduled delivery by time of day
Customizable plans based on user ratings
Ability to pause, reschedule, or modify meals easily

Each feature was designed to reduce friction rather than add control complexity.

Reflection

This project helped me explore how small, recurring decisions compound into meaningful stress over time. Designing Tiffin reinforced the idea that good product design is often about removing choices, not adding more.

It also sharpened my ability to identify everyday problems and translate them into structured product opportunities.

year

2020

timeframe

Concept Project

tools

Figma