Healthy Diet & Lifestyle- App Development
The Problem
We understand that consumers are time-poor, lack cooking skills and nutritional knowledge, it is easy for us to get access to fast food with the booming of the food delivery industry. In this project, our team is aiming to build the tool would help people keep on track with their food choices and cultivate the habit of consuming healthy alternative foods.
My Role
Consists of three parts
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User Analysis
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UX Research and Design
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Project Management
The Challenge
How might we educate consumers about the power of nutritious foods and improve their food choices in a fast-paced lifestyle?
The Outcome
Our team designed a non-invasive tool to help users use healthy alternative ingredients in their cooking, keep track of their diet needs and provide users with suggestions for health-improving recipes and activities.
The Approach
User Research
We began this project with a limited understanding of our target users in terms of finding the most effective cohort to target with the health-improving app.
We wrote out a few questions to explore some ideas we had in mind.
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How often do you do grocery shopping/ Are you the primary shopper for the household?
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Choose descriptions of the likeness of cooking
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How often do you use food delivery services or have takeaways?
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What’s your source of cooking inspiration?
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Living arrangements
We were able to obtain some overview of our user group
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We decided to narrow down target users to two age groups, one is young working professionals, and the other one is parents cooking for families.
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Majority of users prefer to use recipe websites for cooking inspirations and cooking instructions
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Portion control is one of the issues affecting people's likelihood of cooking
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Time-poor is another problem
In-depth Interview
We also interviewed potential users from different age groups and in different level of cooking competency. Some unusual and unexpected findings:
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For families with teenagers, parents are struggling to give their kids a diverse range of food for lunches due to peer pressure.
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For busy working professionals, juggling between social life and home cooking, don't know what to cook most of the time.
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Participants are expecting the app function to be more than just tracking calorie intakes, consumers wanting to understand what the data means and how could they utilise that to improve their health.
User Journey Mapping
We matched the insights and users' expectations with the development of the app features and identified pain points with grocery shopping, cooking, dealing with leftovers.
Personas
Our researches led us to derive our personas, where these personas help us better empathises with the users' needs, attitude, behaviour change, frustrations or pain points.
Defining Core Functionalities
We synthesised the gathered insights, and based on the findings we determined the core functionality for this app would be to assist users with individualised tips for healthier options in food and lifestyle. To cultivate new habits, we've also created gamification, nudge notification and food communities features for users to support each other along the journey.
For the app to provide personalised tips, users would also have the option to connect their tracking devices/smartwatches with the app and log their daily activities. Only in this time, the app would use the tracking data to make suggestions, provide users with facts and tips on what could be added in their diet to make them feel better.
There was another interesting finding that users often relate their motivation to cook with their mood; we then plan to put mood tracking function in the next stage of the app development.
Process Flow
Wireframing & Prototyping
We then drafted the low/medium-fidelity prototype. Click the image below to view the prototype.
Usability Testing
With the clickable prototype, we had two rounds of testing; we asked the participants to complete two tasks while we observed and noted down their interactions with the system.
Issues the participants identified with the prototype:
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Shopping list generator and recipe creator could put under separate tabs.
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Not many options for vegan/vegetarian
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Reduce the amount of text
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Add indicators to guide users to discover the app