The Ultimate Nutrition
Case study, Product Designer
Intro
Today reclaiming our health in a nutritionally confusing world is challenging; different food nutrition trends, myths, and truths change almost daily.
Some people support vegetarianism or veganism diet as the best, and others support paleo; some go towards protocols such as autoimmune to improve inflammatory conditions, or the latest detox based on juices to cleanse your body, or for example, more recently it has emerged, the Keto diet.
Furthermore, worldwide we face a big problem in our modern industrial diet; according to United Nations, “Every year, 41 million people are killed prematurely by preventable chronic illnesses” (September 2018). These chronic diseases like heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, depression, and most diseases of aging that exist today are related to inadequate nutrition.
Our body is a biological machine and ecosystem, healthy food and good nutrition are critical components to achieving a long healthy life. In conventional medicine, diseases within each organ are viewed as separated from the rest of the body, but the reality is that our body is an extensive network.
PHASE 1 — QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
The problem
Users
Life is crazy busy these days, and people struggle to focus on good routines, self-care, and a good healthy diet.
Also, following specific diets or food doctrines often does not benefit everyone equally. Quoting Dr. Mark Hyman, “Food is far more than just calories or energy to fuel our bodies. Food can also rejuvenate us and even reverse disease.” The key is to understand our gut microbiota, genetics, DNA, and biochemical uniqueness.
Learning this can guide us towards personalized nutrition to eating the proper diet; this is critical to cultivating our inner garden.
In addition, nutritionists often have to resort to a specific type of diet conditionally, for example:
- Keto diet is beneficial in cases of cancer, epilepsy, neurological problems, SIBO
- The autoimmune protocol is interesting in cases of inflammation that do not improve simply by eating a balanced diet.
The App
Most nutritional apps are very generics and don’t have this approach and most important: all diets are not ideal for everybody or sustainable in the long term.
A study was made in Bologna University called: Assessment of nutrition-focused mobile apps’ influence on consumers’ healthy food behavior and nutrition knowledge. (November 2019)
The study’s findings showed that nutrition-information apps:
- Could be effective in overcoming what consumers perceive as personal limitations in approaching healthy food.
- Decreases the perception of the barriers to healthy food eating.
- Users have a higher perceived emotional strength and self-confidence in approaching healthy food.
- Users improved their objective and subjective knowledge of healthy food.
- Family members and friends play a specific role in healthy food behavior.
The recommendation in the study says: “consumer behavior scientists, marketing researchers, nutritionists, and app developers cooperate in the app’s design to improve nutrition information app effectiveness”.
User persona
Carol Green, 38
Marketing Dpt — Wetaca, Madrid
“The seed you plant today will keep you strong and thriving in the future”
Carol is 38 years old, is a marketing specialist at Wetaca startup, she lives in Madrid. She studies online and new media communication. She is very aware of her patterns behaviors.
She is trying to keep good routines, self-care, and a healthy diet. However, she struggles with feeling energetic, focused, and full of vitality every single day.
She has done all diets, and none of them have worked for her. She is trying to build her motivation and is planning actions in favor of healthy eating.
Consumption patterns and behaviors:
She buys nutritions books, pays for meditations apps, and tries to buy everything in organic markets.
Lifestyle:
She (try to) practice 15 minutes of HIT every morning and then meditate 15 minutes after workout. She likes to visit her family and friends, also she prefers living near to her job to go walking there.
Needs:
She needs to boost her lifestyle and build motivation. She wants to build habits and routines to optimize longevity and aging. She would like to upgrade her type of diet. She is looking for something practical but custom just for her. She wants to have the flexibility to not depend on a nutritionist or a specialist all the time, except for those moments when she feels stuck.
#01 Design challenge
We will redesign the way nutritional apps approach people to improve the experience of empowering them because they value their lifestyle.
#02 RE-Design challenge
We will redesign the approach nutritional apps have with people to improve their experience reclaiming their health, because they value eating the right diets, by empowering users with a digital product that has a true impact on their routines, self-care, and a good healthy diet.
Customer Journey
With the customer journey in a timeline we could see all the real and traditional processes that a person experiment when is working together with a nutritionist.
Pain points
We will focus on the following paint points:
- Doing diet is stressful
- She needs to plan menus week every week
- She needs to plan a grocery list
- She doesn’t know how to manage social foods
- She needs info to keep learning
- She needs a dashboard to see her progress
PHASE 2 — PROTOTYPE
Idea
Once we have already identified where we want to add value and provide solutions to the user, we formulate a hypothesis that will help to continue the prototyping phase. This hypothesis helps us not to lose focus:
Hypothesis:
Through a digital product for people focused on empowering users to boost their lifestyle through targeted diets, we are empowering users capable to optimize longevity and aging. This tool is helping build habits through self-knowledge and self-care.
User flow
Because the requirement for this analysis specified to develop a minimal flow, and the time was also a limitation, the decision is to focus this user flow on the moment of selection between custom recipes, reviewing this selection for the week, and creating the Mealplan.
It is necessary to mention that this user flow is supposed to happen when the user has already had the first appointment with the specialist. And also DNA and lab tests are ready; this info triggers the custom diet plan in terms of periods depending on the user goal.
Information architecture
Onboarding questions. Machine learning
This onboarding is critical: It is one of the essential parts of the app; now, the user is starting to use the product, and also, we need to get all the necessary information to build a profile. The positive part is that the user probably is motivated to start this journey. Possible questions at this moment are:
1- How can we help you?
2- What is your goal? What are you trying to achieve?
3- Do you follow any specific diet?
4- What is your weight? and your goal?
5- What is your height?
5- What is your gender?
6- When is your birthday?
Within the app, there will be a nutritional professional for advice and the user will have control over which extent to use this service.
As part of the nutritional plan, the user can choose whether 1- to contact a nutritional professional, 2- to do a custom DNA test, or 3- skip these options for later.
DNA tests offer today a great option to assess underlying health conditions based on the genetic pool of the subject. This way, the user can have health insights linked to her particular physiognomy without necessarily being in contact with a nutritionist. This way this app could offer a personalized diet to users.
The following graphic is a broad and brief proposal which has been born taking into account the pain points and previous ideas:
LO-FI SCREENS
This is only a first step and it is necessary to go much deeper. Lo-Fi screens are focus on adding recipes to a weekly plan.
NEXT STEPS
It would be necessary to:
1- Carry out a quantitative study to validate the decisions made.
2- Test the prototype proposed to continue iterating and thus arrive at a suitable prototype.
3- To Go deeper into all flows and Architecture Information.
4- HI-FI and UI / Branding versions should be developed, considering the brand’s values.
5- Define MVP.
6- And last but not least, it would also be interesting to see the process and flow of how labs and nutritionists communicate with their users.
