Role: UX, UI, Branding, Illustration
Tools Used: Figma, Trello, UseBerry, Maze, Illustrator
Project Overview
The brief given for this project involved designing a new wellness app for the National Wellness Institute. The app needed to be centered around one aspect of wellness and have the ability to track this aspect of wellness over time.
The prototype for this project had the following requirements:
Basic features as login/register, set profile, interact with the app to accomplish one tasks.
Visualize progress or other data that the app is storing.
The main user flow for the main feature of the application. Differentiate through value proposition.
The process for this wellness app covered problem discovery, problem definition, and designing an MVP (minimum viable product).
The Problem
Statistics show that kids aren’t eating enough fruit and vegetables on a daily basis, and because of this, they are missing out on important nutrients our bodies need. Many parents struggle with kids objecting to eating enough fruit and vegetables, as well as a variety of them.
The numbers vary by country and region, but overall children are not consuming the recommended amounts of fruit and vegetables.
Research
After some initial research into the prevalence of the issue of children with unmet nutritional needs, I looked into nutritional campaigns geared towards children, as well as current apps that exist on the market for kids to learn more about health and track their daily nutritional habits. The competitive analysis below shows where the competition falls in terms of tracking food vs. being more geared towards simply educating children about nutrition. Some apps attempt to do it all by tracking a combination of nutrition as well as activity.
One thing I found missing is that there are currently no apps that allow a child to log a specific fruit or vegetable and learn more information about the benefits of it.
Survey + Interviews
Conducting interviews with parents as well as a survey about their children’s relationships with fruit and vegetables uncovered the following insights:
The results of the parent survey showed me two things:
There is indeed a problem with convincing children to eat enough produce on a daily basis.
An opportunity exists to educate children about the importance of including fruit and vegetables in their diet.
Audience
The majority of the parents surveyed and interviewed had children in the 6–8 age range, which is the age range this app focuses on. At this age, children are able to read and have the ability to interact with an app that tracks their health habits. One mother I surveyed even talked about
how her 6 year old son has a smart watch that tracks his daily steps, and that the game aspect of it really seems to help motivate him to accomplish his goal.
An empathy map really helped me to get inside of the user’s head about their thoughts, feelings and motivations. It also helped to develop a user persona, Daniel, along with his user journey.
MoSCow Prioritisation
With the survey and interviews complete, a MoSCow prioritisation chart helped me to focus on what could be accomplished over the course of this project, as well as what features would be most important to include.
While I had several ideas for features the app could have, these fell outside of what was truly necessary to design a MVP. This list could instead be used as ideas to expand upon after the initial launch of the app.
Hypothesis
An app that tracks children’s consumption of fruit and vegetables will allow both parents and children to see whether or not nutritional needs are met. By making the app fun, educational and goal oriented, children will have more involvement in their health, learn more about nutrition, and be more motivated to make healthy choices when they see they’re able to reach their goals.
User Flow
One of the considerations I had to take into account for this project is that this app would be specifically for children and then requirements for this differ from apps geared towards adults. This included the following:
Signing up for the app would need to include parental consent as a part of this process.
Making sure that the app wouldn’t store personal information about underage users.
These considerations were important for figuring out how the user flow would work.
Branding
Mood Board
After laying the groundwork for the overall structure and functionality of the app, I proceeded to figure out the look and feel of the brand. A brand attribute list and mood board worked together to visually demonstrate this.
Style Tile
It was important that the app would be bright, colourful and positive to appeal to children and make learning fun and engaging.
The mood board and brand attributes really helped inform the general vibe of the brand, and inspired the final logo design, typography and illustration style I would use to develop Freggie (fruit + veggie), as shown below.
Hi-Fi Prototype
The hi-fi prototype shows the user flow of someone signing up for the app for the first time, and using it to accomplish a goal of eating 2 servings of fruit and 3 servings of vegetables.
First, a parent must sign up for an account and give consent for their child to start using the app.
Once it is the child’s turn to activate their account, they simply enter their name, age and select an avatar.
The main menu allows the user to view a list of all freggies, a daily calendar that shows progress, as well as a monthly overview of the number of days they have reached their goal, and their profile information.
From the freggie list, the child can click on an individual fruit or vegetable and add it to their day.
Once their goal has been reached, an animated screen is shown to congratulate the user.
The hi-fi prototype was tested with users in the remaining time left for this project, and small changes were made to improve the usability.
Next Steps
Additional testing, especially with kids.
Add additional features including rewards and games.
Include the option to share status with parents.
Add more data visualization to show how often the user eats a particular fruit or vegetable.