Time Frame
Role
Involvement
2022.6-2022.11
UI/UX Designer, Usability Researcher
User Journey Map, Wireframing, Usability Testing, Iconography Design
In this App, I’m aiming to help young adults form and keep healthy eating habits as well as help and enable them to plan and record healthy diets.
>> Takeaways
Overview
>> Research
Busy young singles fail to maintain healthy long-term diets
1, Hard to change current lifestyles
Current lifestyles change is complicated and complex because it requires a person to disrupt a current habit while simultaneously fostering a new, possibly unfamiliar, set of actions. This series of action always take longer than our expectation.
2, Too busy to plan or record every meal
Meal planning and recording require that you be somewhat organized. Trying to put together a plan when you have no idea where all your favorite recipes are or what you ate in the last month is going to make things much more difficult.
3, Easily affected by others in social life
We eat differently when we are with other people compared with when we eat alone. Our dietary choices also tend to converge with those of our close social connections. One reason for this is that conforming to the behavior of others is adaptive and we find it rewarding.
Solutions
Start little
The key to succeeding long-term is to set small, achievable short-term goals instead of extravagant goals that will leave you feeling overwhelmed and hopeless.
Breaking or forming new habits with drastic changes is not sustainable or realistic. Instead, take baby steps to help you ease into a healthier diet by focusing on accomplishing little habits that are more doable.
Automatically meal recommend/record
Holding yourself accountable for what you eat is a great way to raise awareness of yourself, and the amount of calories, protein, fat, and carbohydrates.
Scientifically generate healthy recipes and menus according to the ingredients you have. Choose like or dislike depending on your choices, the app will record and calculate the calories and nutrition automatically.
Set up community and leaderboard
Emphasizing the healthy eating intentions and behaviors of others may be beneficial in bringing about dietary change.
Share healthy lives with each other in your community. See who did a good job of keeping and forming good habits and supervising each other.
Process Overview
01.Research
02.Define
03.Ideate
04.Design&Test
Interview
Competitor Analysis
User Pain Points
Persona
HMW Question
User Goal
Visualizing Concept
Usability Test
Improvements & Iterations
Final Product
Style Guide
01.
RESEARCH
Started From…
User Interview
I interviewed 11 target audiences about their eating habits and living patterns. (Click pic for details)
However, after analyzing and concluding all the answers, this is what I got:
Give Up Easily/Cannot persist in >>> Cannot form long-term habits
Affinity Diagram
Pain Points
the real pain points are not calculating and controlling calories. In fact, people frustrated and unable to form healthy lifestyles because of the failure of not form healthy long-term habits
Competitive Analysis
So the whole story begins with me losing 30 pounds of weight. And when I checked back to see what caused it, I found out that I had been following some pretty unhealthy diets. You know, eating healthy is one of the best things you can do for your health. It gives you more energy in your day-to-day life and can even affect your mental health.
As a young single, I noticed that a lot of my peers were struggling with similar issues. We'd stay up late and munch on fried chicken and fast food, which wasn't doing us any favors.
I want to explore what’s popular in the market right now and what can they provide to the users.
FatSecret offers an easy to use food diary for you to track as well as plan in advance what you’re going to eat. Image recognition of food and meals make it even easier to add what you’re eating, with a community that’s keen to advise on how best to proceed. A weight tracking tool, along with barcode scanning, rounds off the package.
HMW Question
How might we help young adults who have a tight and chaotic schedule to form healthier eating diets and lifestyles?
Initial Assumption
Busy young singles fail to keep on healthy diets.
YAZIO offers a personal plan for losing weight or building muscles, before allowing you to track the nutritional elements of your meal. You can create meal plans, track your calories and daily steps taken, as well as sync up with other fitness apps.
Lose It! wants you to lose weight while also enjoying the process. Simply telling it a little about yourself, it’ll devise a custom weight loss plan, setting you a daily budget and goal to aim for.
From the people behind Livestrong.com, MyPlate Calorie Tracker hopes to be the most user-friendly option for losing weight. The app helps you find out which foods you eat contain the most calories, allowing you to set personalized daily calorie goals.
UI unfriendly
Not focus on nutrition
No community to follow
Hard to persist
No reminder/tracking
Type in lots of info
Don’t want to start
Inconvenient
All the apps are overly focused on calorie counting and controlling.
After identifying the problem and receiving the insights from the competitive analysis, I want to start collecting first-hand information from my target audience to validate the assumptions about controlling and counting calories are suitable ways and catch their real needs.
02.
DEFINE
Persona
Lynn / 24 years old / Software developer
Live alone
Busy with a tight schedule
Irregular and chaotic daily schedule
No time to prepare meals on weekdays
Want to learn how to cook healthily
Live in the city
— — “I really want to form and keep a healthy diet“
Reframing HMW Questions
How might we create a sustainable solution that empowers young adults to adopt and maintain long-term healthy eating habits and lifestyles, despite the difficulties posed by their busy schedules, social influences, and the challenge of changing their current lifestyle?
03.
IDEATE
Design Goal#1 - Hard to change current lifestyles
When solving the problem of "hard to change current lifestyle," there are various approaches and strategies that can be employed, so I did a concept exploration and finally go with the option: Start Little.
Therefore, I designed low-fidelity wireframes.
Design Goal#2 - Busy to plan or record every meal
From the beginning, I decide to automatically provide a customized recipe that can be recorded into the app and keep the “manually enter” feature inside. Three parallel features above each play an identical and important role.
At last, by changing the informational architecture, users choose from “made by myself” and “dine out” because that will be clear in logic, and users just need to differentiate between your initial motivation.
Therefore, I designed low-fidelity wireframes.
Design Goal#3 - Easily affect by others in social life
The original plan was to build up a community for professors or influencers to push up featured articles.
Not only think about what I should provide and directly add-in features that might not be relevant but to ask out audience: do you feel accomplished after using it?
Therefore, I designed low-fidelity wireframes.
Visualizing Concept
04.
DESIGN&TEST
1
2
3
First Feature - Hard to change current lifestyle
Start Little
Design Decision#3
Iteration
Design Decision#1
We have decided not to use a drop-down menu and instead show all available choices because we believe this approach has several advantages. The main reason for this decision is that scalability is not an issue for our application, and we want to make the options more visible to the user. Although this approach may take up more space, we believe that the benefits of improved visibility — improved discoverability， better understanding and faster selection outweigh any potential drawbacks.
Iteration
Second Feature - Busy to plan and record every meal
Automatically meal recommend & record
Asking users: how do you prioritize these filters?
Create a new layout that prioritizes the most frequently and top rated bias, based on user feedback and data analysis.
Third Feature - Easily affect by others in social life
Set up community and leaderboards
Design Decision#4
Recommendation bar and Set Up bar should be parallel in the interface and in the information architecture
Use Search to quickly locate
Implement swipe navigation instead of using list view or grid view in our application. We believe that swipe navigation has several advantages over the other two options, including better user engagement, faster navigation, and more intuitive interaction.
Engaging experience: Swipe navigation allows users to interact with content in a more tactile and engaging way, creating a more immersive experience.
Faster navigation: Users can quickly move through content with a simple swipe gesture, eliminating the need to scroll through a long list or grid of items.
Intuitive interaction: Swiping left or right is a common gesture that most users are already familiar with, making it an intuitive and easy-to-use interface.
Use a Floating Action Button (FAB) in our application as it offers several benefits that align with our design goals. The FAB is a prominent design element that persuades and promotes important actions to users, leveraging their engagement with the application.
Prominent design: The FAB is a visually prominent design element that draws users' attention, making it an effective way to promote important actions.
Easy access: By placing the FAB in a consistent location, such as the bottom right corner of the screen, users can easily access it without having to search for it.
Leverages user engagement: By promoting important actions through the FAB, users are more likely to engage with the application and complete desired tasks.
Final Product
Onboarding: Guide me through
A warm welcoming sign-in page together with a neat and clear survey provide you with a customized app and customized features
Start little: Set my own habits
Feel free to add in your little habits with details and repeat time! Keep checking in and follow what you want to do to form long-term habits.
Recommend: Suggest little habits for you
If you don’t have any ideas for adding little habits, don’t worry, here we provided with tons of suggested habits that are easy to follow and great to form.
My meals: Recipes generator
It’s great and necessary to record everyday healthy meals. This feature helps you when you have no idea about making meals at home. You can easily become your the chef of yourself by following all kinds of the healthy recipe provided here.
My meals: Dine out can also be a choice
Dining out with junk food or fast food frequently can cause big problems. This feature provides you with different filters that you can choose from when you are browsing and deciding which one you should go with.
My journey: Collecting my data
In my journey, you can clearly view your everyday nutrition input and calories. As well as the recording of checking in little habits. There will also be a library for your medals for accomplishing different goals.
Community and Leaderboard
Sharing your healthy life with friends is the most happiness moment! That is also a good way to help supervise each other. At the same time, we can also find out who did a good job in a certain field. Tips: the leaderboard content can be changed!
Reflections and Takeaway
Never assume
This is a first end-to-end full track user-centered design project that I did by myself, so I gained lots of experience and learned a lot from this case. One of the most impressive one is never assume your users. I always like to come up with as much as ideas in the ideate phase, in order to fill my project with tons of creativity and message. However, we are always designing for others, not ourselves. It is the most important task to listen to the users themselves. Furthermore, don’t try to lead or persuade your users during the interview, even it would be unintentional, only in this case, the results can turn out to be true and fair. I’m pretty excited about the final products, especially all the improvements I’ve made during the whole process.