Type: Team project | University of Pennsylvania | Timeline: 2023 (4 weeks) | Role: UX Designer
Supporting young adults to proactively improve their diets to stay healthy
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How might we support health-conscious young adults with a busy schedule to proactively improve their diets to stay healthy?
Brief
As part of a university team project, consisting of me and Sanchi Jain, we received the overarching brief to design a digital product helping individuals take care of their bodies. We explored designing a mobile application to help young adults proactively improve their diets to stay healthy.
Outcome
A fully designed mobile prototype and an 18-page slide deck including the following deliverables:
Persona / User interviews / User experience map / Competitor assessments / MOSCOW Analysis / Wireframes / User testing
Our proposal was reimagining food-tracking apps as holistic health advisors, powered by simple machine-learning algorithms. The devised approach significantly lowers the barrier to capturing what you eat, provides highly personalised and actionable dietary suggestions, gives you a holistic overview of how your diet affects tangible health metrics, and focuses on the strongly neglected category of vitamins and minerals (micronutrients).
Target persona
Our target persona was health-conscious young adults with a busy schedule, specifically young professionals and graduate students.
Outlined target persona
Assumptions
3 key assumptions led us to focus on the outlined target group
01
They often have a very busy schedule, making it more challenging to consistently follow healthy eating habits
02
They face financial constraints preventing them from purchasing the healthiest food at all times
03
They increasingly care about their health and use digital solutions to track it (e.g. wearables and food-tracking applications)
User Interviews
We conducted 8 user interviews with individuals matching our target persona. These insights led us to form our guiding problem statement of how we might support young adults to proactively improve their diets to stay healthy.
Key takeaways
01 Getting regular feedback about potential nutritional deficiencies is challenging
02 Eating sufficient fruits and vegetables is often overlooked by young adults
03 Many had previously experimented with food-tracking apps to reach personal health and fitness goals
04 Most food-tracking apps they used dominantly focused on weight loss and calories, and did not align with many young adults’ health goals
05 Everybody found food-tracking apps tedious to use
06 Most food-tracking apps they used dominantly focused on macronutrients, while neglecting the importance of vitamins/minerals
Ideation
We brainstormed a multitude of potential ideas. The different directions were then prioritised based on the impact they would provide to the target group and the effort required for implementation.
This led us to focus on the idea of giving users a baseline indication if they are eating healthy or not and getting sufficient nutrition.
Selected ideas mapped based on potential impact and effort required
Competitive analysis
We further conducted a competitive analysis, to see how popular food-tracking apps cater to this goal. This was because food-tracking apps were the most similar solution identified to our idea which also catered to the pain points we wanted to address.
We found that the most popularly used apps have:
01 A time-consuming process to record meals you eat
02 Are dominantly focused on weight loss and calories
03 Provides no to little feedback on how your diet affects tangible health metrics
04 They don’t prioritise providing information about one’s micronutrient intake
Competitive analysis of four highly popular food-tracking applications
Sketches & wireframes
Considering what already is in the market and what we wanted our direction to be, we used the MOSCOW framework to prioritise the features we had brainstormed.
Features explored in initial sketches:
01 Recording meals through snapping photographs
02 Recording meals through an AI chatbot, equivalent to ChatGPT, which could also answer nutritional questions
03 Visual log of meals you have eaten in the past
04 Overview of your micronutrient deficiencies
05 Estimations for how your diet has affected your risk of getting certain diseases
06 Give you personalised and actionable suggestions to improve your diet
Testing
We tested our wireframes as a Figma prototype with 10 users resembling our target persona, both in-person and virtually through Zoom. Insights could be synthesised to 4 key takeaways.
01
Recording meals accurately was still too tedious
02
As the meal logging was inaccurate the detailed analytics was not as trustworthy or valuable
03
The provided information in the app could be more intuitive and actionable
04
Information about micronutrient deficiencies and how they impact one’s overall health were highly valued
Synthesised user experience map based on testing sessions
Key considerations
In essence, we boiled down all feedback into 3 actionable considerations for our future revisions.
01
Ballpark indications telling if users were simply eating healthy or not were sufficient
02
Provided insights should be highly personalised and easy to act on
03
Micronutrients should be the dominant focus of the app to provide the most unique value proposition
Final design
01 Homepage
Presents personalised suggestions for how users may improve their current diet: how users may add or remove ingredients from meals they usually eat with multiple alternatives
Based on users’ nutritional deficiency, 3 actionable goals are presented each week so users know what micronutrient they may focus on improving
A visual overview of their progress on achieving these goals that particular week.
Pictures of real food were used for micronutrients to foster a stronger association between the abstract-sounding nutrients and the food they are present in
02 Recording meals
Meals recordings through snapping a photo, where an ML algorithm will identify the present ingredients.
Ability to quickly change the quantity of the listed ingredients if preferred, or easily type in adjustments for quantities or items to add or remove.
Nudging users to provide more accurate data, by stating it will allow them to receive better personalised suggestions, analyses, and improve the detection of their captured meals, but that it is not necessary.
03 Food journal
Allows users to get an overview of meals they have eaten in the past and get a short summary of what they did well that day and how they could have improved their diet
Functionality to optimise users’ usual meals with an AI system, that provides easily accessible ingredients to include and suggestions for what to remove from their meals
04 Health progress
Based on users’ micronutrient intake, they are able to overview how their diet has contributed to improving tangible health metrics such as their immunity, sleep quality, energy levels, gut health, cognitive function, skin health, and strength and endurance
Design system
To streamline design work, enforce consistency, and follow best UX practices, I developed a design system spanning grid systems, colours, typography, and spacing components.
What I learned
This project taught me how to creatively use UI design to strategically cater to user pain points and increase a solution’s value.
The project was a great exercise in identifying existing solutions and reimagining their user experience and value proposition to address unmet needs for an overlooked persona.
I learned how to better consider the interplay between the functional and emotional sides of design to make a product both valuable and enjoyable to use