Monitoring users' eating habits and encouraging healthy eating habits.
TEAM
4 HCI students
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MY ROLE
Researcher,
UX Designer
DURATION
9 weeks
TOOLS USED
Figma, Miro, Balsamiq
PROBLEM
Due to busy lifestyles, people tend to move to quick, pre-prepared meals which usually tends to have a lot of unhealthy ingredients
Our users can't make informed food decisions and find it difficult to develop healthy eating habits in their daily life.
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As a part of my Interaction Design Practices course all the students were divided in the group of 4 to work on an end-to-end project. We decided to choose the area of healthy eating as I along with some other classmates of ours started developing allergies to pre-packaged food items (it was ramen for me :( ). Hence, we started working on this problem.
SOLUTION
NutrieScan enables users identify the health benefits and drawbacks of food products without much effort.
Instant food has a lot of preservatives, synthetic ingredients which often can have negative impact on health and consuming such products on a daily basis can lead to health risks. Hence, it’s important to the users to learn the effects of such food products on their health.
Personalization
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Onboarding process is done right at the beginning so that the system can understand the user's needs, requirements and constrains such that the application can give a customized list of healthy food products.
Easy scanning of ingredients
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The scanning feature allows the users scan the barcode and ingredients lists on the food products in order to understand the customized positives and negatives effects of that particular food products on their bodies
Summary of diet
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Summary of the user's diet and health score is clearly indicated on the home screen of the application.
Health Score
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The users here will be able to see their monthly review of their foods. They'll be able to see the score of the food products they brought and the system will calculate the health score accordingly.
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These scores will encourage users to start eating healthy
DESK RESEARCH
“Innovations which have a direct and visible advantage are more likely to be accepted faster than those with not so visible or easily understood advantages.”
9 research papers were reviewed, which mostly belonged to two categories:
1) Papers that gave scientific insights about how processed foods, fast foods affects the health of individuals.
2) Papers that gave insight about technologies that tackle this problem.
Packaged foods often contain added sugars, sodium, trans fats, and artificial additives, which can contribute to weight gain, heart disease, diabetes, and other negative health effects.
Appropriate choices could, over a month, reduce intake of added sugar by over 800 g and fat by over 200 g.
OBSERVATIONS
People usually buy easy-to-prepare, frozen or instant meals & some user actively make sure to look at various ingredients in the food products.
I conducted 100 minutes of observations in two different locations (Kroger and Campus Center). Observations helped us pinpoint various instances and opportunities where an individual could make healthier food consuming choices. We conducted observations to help us validate some of our findings from observations and interviews.
USER INTERVIEWS
Limited affordability and proximity challenges prevent some individuals from accessing healthier food options.
Conducted 8 interviews, the research helped us understand the eating habits, experience with allergies, experience with grocery shopping, etc. of our user groups which ranged from families to university students.
“I am very cautious about what I eat, I read the ingredients and if it sounds complex I tend to put it back in the shelf”
“I monitor my sugar and sodium intake as I got gestational diabetes during my pregnancy. It helped me learn about the large amount of sugars in food”
FILTERING THE DATA
Affinity diagramming
We filtered the data collected during interviews, observations and literature reviews by affinity diagramming. This helped us understand different categories of why people struggle to eat healthy.
Notes from observations, interviews, and literature reviews
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Affinity diagramming
Empathy mapping
After this, we did empathy mapping to understand more about our users' needs. It helped us understand the users’ specific needs and goals for developing healthy eating habits
Empathy mapping
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Most of the applications only focused on achieving the fitness goals by tracking calories and macros intake, none of them focused on holistic health goals.
We conducted the competitive analysis of the applications which were very popular among the users. The main motive of this analysis was to find out if the present products are helping the user educate about the positives and negatives of food on their bodies.
Fooducate
MyFitnessPal
Track
Macrostax
Fitness Goals
The apps available were mostly focused on helping people achieve their physical fitness goals
Calorie trackers
Most of the apps were calorie trackers and only focused on the macros intake
Generalized Information
One application did focus on helping people educate about effects of food products but it was very generalized
No customization
No apps let people customize their health goals which were other than fitness goals, and didn't take considerations about the user's health concerns
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
Pain Points
Cognitive Overload
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Food industries provide way too many options and variety. The effort it takes to filter these food products causes analysis paralysis
Unawareness about effects of unhealthy food
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Participants were divided into extreme personalities,
1) health focused individuals
2) people with moderate to no awareness about ill effects of bad food.
Difficult to find food alternative
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Every individual has their own unique health requirements. Finding food products which meets their requirements is difficult for the users
Busy schedule
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Busy lifestyle of the users makes it difficult for them to eat healthy and hence they rely on instant meals and take outs
User Persona
Based on the literature reviews, interviews, observations, and competitive analysis we realized that most of the people who struggle with unhealthy eating habits are professionals and students having long tiring working hours.
Problem Definition
How might we help busy individuals make informed food decisions and develop healthy eating habits in their daily life?
IDEATION
Brainstorming
To get the maximum number of ideas, we conducted 3 brainstorming sessions. These sessions were as follows;
Individual Session
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Each team member generated 10 different ideas.
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Team Session
This is where we shared our ideas from individual sessions & then generated 30 ideas as a team.
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Shared Session
We collaborated with other teams from our class for this session and generated 10 ideas.
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Then we sat together as a group and clustered these 80 ideas into different categories, which were, suggestive food apps, analytic products, information based products, community apps, wearables, AR/VR and AI products, and games.
The bouncing-off of ideas during the brainstorming sessions proved vital in deciding our design direction and key features.
Storyboarding
After the brainstorming session our group decided to move forward with one solution. Then to validate our ideated solution, we created a storyboard. This storyboard gave us insight into how the solution would resolve the discovered problems.
The Solution
With the brainstorming session, we realized that we can come up the best solution by combining different ideas from the 80 ideas.
The NutrieScan application best fits the consumer needs and therefore we decided to go ahead with it.
This solution will enable users identify the health benefits and drawbacks of food products without much effort.
THE SOLUTION
Information Architecture
Sketches
Mockups
Onboarding
Onboarding process is done right at the beginning so that the system can understand the user's needs, requirements and constrains such that the system can give a customized list of healthy food products.
Homescreen
The home screen's first tab is to show users their health score, and second and third screen suggests foods to buy and healthy recipes & diets respectively.
Scanning
With the scanning feature, the user could scan the barcode and ingredients lists of food products and will be then able to understand the customized positives and negatives effects of that particular food products on their bodies
Health score
The users here will be able to see their monthly review of their foods. They'll be able to see the score of the food products they brought and the system will calculate the health score accordingly (food products will be graded by nutrients, ingredients, processing, salt and sugar. These will be customized on the user's requirements)
USABILITY TESTING
Once our low-fidelity prototype was ready, we ran a usability testing with five participants to find the shortcomings of our application.
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The findings from the usability testing were:
Bad UX writing
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The user was very confused about the option called “reccos”, “foods” on the home screen. These categories is not specific enough to understand its purpose, suggestions and health was well understood.
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No save button
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As there was no save button on the product description page and this lost the point because if the user liked the product and would want to buy it in future, they don’t have any option to save it.
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Inconsistency
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The option in the hamburger menu says “history”, but on the page, the title says “recent”
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Confusing food product scale
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The user didn’t understand how to read the indicator-like scale, as that scale was used only for one section in the design (history page).
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Design updates
Design was updated according to the findings from the usability testings.
Confusing UX writing was replaced by universally identified icons
Save button was added in the high-fidelity mockups
Food product scale on history page was improved to a simpler scale by showing red and green tags.
Fixed navigation bar on the bottom of the page
Heuristic Evaluations
After updating the designs with the finding from usability testing, we conducted a heuristic evaluations. We used Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for this evaluation.
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The heuristic which were violated are:
User control and freedom
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Goals on survey is not customizable
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Help and documentation
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No help and documentation anywhere in the app
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NEXT STEPS
With the feedback collected, the list of tasks were made to address later on:
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Improve the rubrics of the health score of the food products by focusing more on the needs and goals of the user. (currently only 25% of the grading is allowed for customization according to the user)
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Giving freedom to the users to set their own goals and not restrict them with the pre-existing goals in the application
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Adding help & documentations at the places where user might not understand the next steps
IMPACT
This application will not only educate users about the good and bad effects of foods on their health, but it will also help them motivate to implement healthy eating in their everyday life by showing them their monthly health overview.
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This app won't give any general score but will customize the score according to the users goals and needs.
TAKEAWAY
My Learning Outcomes
As my first team project in an academic setting I learnt a lot of things which wouldn't have been possible if I were to work alone. Here are a few things which I learnt in this during this project:
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Generate as many ideas as possible to come up with unique and creative solutions to address the problem.
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Mixing and matching ideas to address the key product requirements.
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Focusing on solving one problem at a time.
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Creating a psychologically safe work environment for the teammates in the group.
What could I have done differently?
As most the feedback was given on the grading system of the the food products which was developed after studying multiple research papers, talking to a health professional would have been very beneficial when the team worked on the grading system.