Overview
Green Chef is a meal-kit delivery service where customers order a box of meals each week. Previously, if users didn't like a week's meals or were out of town, their only option was to skip the order entirely. I designed a new set of account-management features that solve for this with easy planning, scheduling, and delivery options.
I owned the redesign end to end, from understanding why customers skip to shaping features that give them the flexibility to stay subscribed, directly protecting Green Chef's ship rate.
What is a meal-kit delivery service?
Meal-kit services like Green Chef are subscription-based: they send customers pre-measured, pre-prepped ingredients, sauces, and a step-by-step recipe card to cook fresh meals at home. Customers pick from a range of meal plans and get a box delivered to their door — saving them the weekly hassle of grocery shopping and meal planning.
Why do users skip?
We ran 30+ customer calls, partnered with support to study tickets, and sent out surveys to understand what makes customers skip.
Changing meal preference
The biggest driver: people skip a week when they don't like that week's recipes.
Changing delivery day
"Change delivery day for one week" appeared in 26.6K support tickets.
Changing delivery address
"Change address for one week" appeared in nearly 10K support tickets.
Changing box quantity
Customers wanted to add an extra box for a week — for guests or family — then revert.
"I don't like salmon/potato. I usually skip the week you've got salmon or potato in your recipes."
The through-line: users need the flexibility to modify their orders. The original design didn't allow a one-time change of menu — the only way was to change the meal plan at the subscription level, which affected every future week. That limited flexibility during planning and scheduling forced people to skip weeks, cancel, or bounce to a competing meal kit.
From "skip" to "modify"
It became clear that with no flexibility, users skip. There was a need to let users edit and modify different aspects of their weekly orders instead.
Order management, reimagined
Responsive design
Green Chef's experience has been primarily desktop-first — engagement is higher there, per both quantitative and qualitative data. I designed the desktop UX first, then translated the flows to mobile web on a responsive strategy once the solution was clear.
Initial results
The project began running experiments in late November 2017.
Over the following months we continued to measure impact, iterate, and improve the experience based on user feedback and data — validating that giving customers lightweight, one-time flexibility keeps them shipping instead of skipping.