My Role
This is my thesis project during my senior year at Virginia Tech focusing on user experiences and creating user interfaces of the app. The project scope includes user research, user testing, experience design, visual design, and prototyping.
Goals
When I was researching this project, I realized our healthcare system heavily prioritizes treatment of patients’ problems over prevention for diseases such as obesity. This results in an increased number of patients yearly, who struggle with developing healthy habits.
My goal was to create a tool for users that promotes a healthier lifestyle that fits with their current lifestyle while providing an easy way to stay connected with healthcare professionals. This way, we can promote preventative care rather than reactively solving issues.
Duration: 14 weeks
Challenges
Obesity presents the greatest threat to health worldwide with poor diet contributing to more disease than physical inactivity, smoking, and alcohol combined. Being overweight leads to many health problems such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke.
Pain-points
After conducting interviews with experts and gathering survey results from potential users, I was able to highlight some common user pain points and opportunities to ideate potential solutions. These insights helped me developed key experiences for our potential users.
Users are not educated enough about healthy food options
Users have found it difficult to maintain healthy habits whether it’s about exercising or consuming healthy food options
Users are overwhelmed by the current platforms and didn’t find anything that fits with their food or exercise preferences
Our heathcare system is not a preventative system. Medical providers only meet with their patients twice a year. It is difficult for nutritionist to treat them efficiently.
Needs
A way to find out about each person’s willingness and motivation to change in order to educate them accordingly.
A way for both physician and patients to track food intake and share results
A way to educate patients about healthy eating habits as well as tracking their progress
Market Research & Opportunities
Although myfitnesspal does a great job of tracking calories, it shouldn’t be the main focus for users to become healthier. Users should instead learn how to become healthier by choosing better food alternatives to help them maintain a healthier diet.
Workouts provides many exercise techniques and is useful for users when they’re learning about how to exercise correctly. However, it doesn’t incorporate each user’s eating habits.
Yummly does a good job of giving food recommendations based on each user’s food taste profile. However, it is missing education about healthier food alternatives.
“How can I encourage healthy eating habits and promote preventative healthcare for overweight
young adults by cooperating closely with professionals”
Understand Key Actions
The user journey was illustrated to understand and communicate key actions users take on the new platform, aiming to create goals that fits with each user. The app should enable users to track and share progress with professionals and eventually learn to maintain their healthy habits.
Analyze
When a user signs up for the app, they’ll choose a main goal to achieve. Then, the application will ask for their weight, body measurements, their current readiness to change, food preferences and dietary restrictions.
The collected information will then be processed and a user targeted health plan will be created for them.
Educate
A user looks at their diet plan and learns more about suggested recipes within that plan. They can view more details about a recipe such as its estimated calories and ingredients. The main components that have an effect on body transformation are carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. It’s important to inform users about what distribution of nutrients they need in a meal.
The user will also be provided alternatives on particular ingredients before they add a recipe to their meal plan. They can then add this curated and edited meal to their diet plan.
Track
The dashboard displays an overview of a user’s progress including daily info about how many calories they have left, what program they are currently participating in, and their current diet plan. They can also explore their favorite recipes through this interface and check mark each meal they’ve eaten today. They can also add a meal quickly by using the plus button on the bottom bar.
They can also get a weekly overview and share their results with their personal doctor before their next visit. This way the doctor can accurately give suggestions during their next appointment.
User Feedback
Feedback from users during the design process is an integral part to creating well designed solutions and here is a glimpse of what I’ve learned so far:
During early phases of my project, I learned that users are overwhelmed with options that do not necessary fit with their lifestyle. This insight helped me learned that users need a guidance throughout their process in order to change their lifestyle.
From users feedback on my mock ups, I learned that users were interested in the recipe but they wish to be educated with possible ingredients that can be substituted for the recipe. Later, I introduced “Substitute” feature that educate users about alternative options users can choose to cook the same recipe.
One of the hardest challenges for users was to maintain their goals once they started their process. I learned that users are motivated by gamification options to keep up their progress towards future goals.
Next Steps
Communication tool between doctor and patients.
A way for users to maintain their goals without losing their motivations
Consult with professionals for further iterations and uncover other possibilities
*Please contact me to learn more about my complete research study