Competitive and Comparative Research:
Initiatives have been taken to combat diabetes though. For example, National Diabetes Prevention Program provide personalised coaching to guide individuals on leading a healthy life. Still, the problem persists. Because these initiatives have low participation rates, their eligibility criteria are restrictive thus accessibility is limited. Plus, adherence to major lifestyle changes is difficult to achieve.
However, in this battle against diabetes, prevention is a favoured weapon. And we need to make effective use of technology to achieve that. Today, we have many gadgets and applications that can guide us to a healthy lifestyle. However, there is still a mismatch between the solution they provide and the gravity of the problem at hand.
For example, many applications listed here, that offer glucose monitoring, nutrition tracking, and personalised healthcare, lack in features that would suit specific needs of young adults and do not have a utility that would encourage sustained user engagements.
Problem and Opportunity Statement:
In context of prevention of prediabetes and type 2 diabetes among young adults aged between 19 to 34, Young adults face a significant nutritional knowledge gap, leading to rising rates of diabetes. Misconceptions about healthy food persist, exacerbated by busy lifestyles. These obstacles prevent many from cooking at home, further hindering the adoption of healthier diets. Many refrain from cooking at home due to the lack of access to proper recipes and grocery lists. This hesitancy is reinforced by the belief that cooking at home is time-consuming and difficult. To prevent diabetes, there is a need for a solution that enables young adults to incorporate healthy eating patterns into their schedules and budgets.
Personas:
We've sculpted three unique user personas, each embodying the essence of our diverse user base. These personas have not only shaped our understanding of our users but have also become the central characters in our empathy mapping technique, allowing us to dive deep into their world, empathize with their challenges, and advocate for their aspirations.
Our decision to incorporate empathy mapping into our data analysis was driven by a desire to gain a profound understanding of our users' emotions, thoughts, and experiences. Leveraging our user personas as guiding beacons, we embarked on this journey to explore beyond the surface and dive deep into the emotional landscape of our users. Every member of our team actively participated in this endeavor, drawing from their insights gleaned from user interviews and personas to populate the empathy map. What distinguishes empathy mapping from affinity diagramming is its laser focus on uncovering the emotional nuances, pain points, and needs of our users, enriching our comprehension of their journey on a more profound level than mere thematic categorization. This exercise equips us with the invaluable insight needed to create a solution that resonates with our users' deepest aspirations and frustrations.
Establishing Baselines:
In our journey to develop a comprehensive nutritional application, we recognized the necessity of establishing a guiding framework to navigate the labyrinth of dietary practices and health information. This led us to the formulation of a definitive understanding of healthy eating, which not only informed the development of our product but also served as a vital means to convey its legitimacy to our user base.
So, what exactly does "healthy eating" entail for us? It revolves around the incorporation of whole, minimally processed foods into one's diet. These foods predominantly encompass fresh fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, whole grains, and unsaturated fats. Conversely, we actively discourage the consumption of packaged foods characterized by highly processed ingredients, such as refined flours, excessive sodium, and sugar, owing to their potential health implications.
Here's the interesting bit: Nutrimate is firmly grounded in adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which functions as our compass. These guidelines are not arbitrary decrees; rather, they are underpinned by rigorous scientific research. They not only cater to the diverse demographics within our user base but also enhance the credibility of Nutrimate as a solution tailored for the health-conscious. Furthermore, their focus on preventing chronic diseases and promoting overall well-being resonates with the core objectives of our solution. Additionally, this association allows Nutrimate to stay in sync with the evolving landscape of health challenges and dietary trends, ensuring that our offering remains aligned with the latest advancements in nutritional science.
Brainstorming and Storyboarding:
Our brainstorming sessions were a thrilling journey beyond the confines of current technology, unleashing our collective creativity. Collaborating with our teammates led to the birth of remarkable concepts that transcended our individual imaginations. We combined insights from two sessions to lay a solid foundation for the third. The initial brainstorming sessions allowed our ideas to roam freely, unhindered by the pressure of immediate solutions. The sketch deliverable from the second session, focusing on Meal Planning, acted as a catalyst, enriching our ideas further.
After these invigorating brainstorming sessions, we honed our concepts, concentrating on pragmatic solutions to tackle the problem at hand. Our vision for future brainstorming sessions includes casting a wider net, involving more participants, even seeking input from strangers, knowing that a diverse pool leads to an ocean of creative solutions.
Ultimately, we emerged with three standout ideas that we believe effectively address our challenge. These concepts shone amidst the brainstorming brilliance:
1.Mobile Application for Personalized Recipes: This option empowers users with a seamless meal planning experience tailored to their dietary preferences and goals. The app takes input on dietary needs and preferences, crafting personalized recipes and corresponding shopping lists adhering to the Dietary Guidelines for America. Moreover, users can even purchase groceries directly through the app. Future integration of AR and AI technology will enable users to scan available ingredients and receive recipe suggestions based on what's at hand, ensuring personalized, efficient meal planning.
2.Smart Refrigerator with Recipe Suggestions and Grocery Ordering: Our choice of the smart refrigerator caters to the challenges of inefficient meal planning, food waste, and grocery management. This ingenious solution seamlessly merges technology with a household staple, offering real-time recipe suggestions based on available ingredients. Advanced sensors accurately monitor the fridge's contents, prompting recipes that make the most of existing items. Missing ingredients are automatically ordered, streamlining the meal planning process. The fridge's machine learning algorithms predict users' dietary habits and preferences, providing personalized meal plans and grocery lists. Additionally, it helps in reducing food waste by tracking item freshness and suggesting ways to use them before they expire. In a nutshell, the smart refrigerator revolutionizes meal planning, grocery management, and food waste reduction, elevating kitchen tech to a new level.
3.Healthy Meal Vending Machine in Grocery Store/Campus/Workplaces: Our choice of the vending machine simplifies meal preparation for busy users seeking easy access to healthy meals. The vending machine offers recipe-based meal packs with all the necessary ingredients for specific dishes. Users can effortlessly follow provided recipe instructions, making cooking nutritious meals convenient and accessible. It eliminates the need for extensive grocery shopping and meal planning, aligning with our goal of promoting healthier eating habits. This option caters to the preparation of nutritious, delicious meals and provides easy access to wholesome meal options when traditional grocery shopping isn't practical, making healthy eating more achievable for all.
After thorough consideration, we've opted to create a mobile app as our design solution, recognizing its efficiency and alignment with user needs. Addressing widespread challenges like limited nutritional knowledge, recipe scarcity, grocery uncertainty, and the desire for calorie tracking, our app will offer personalized meal plans. Users can tailor these plans to their preferences, allergies, budgets, and favorite cuisines, with options for daily, weekly, or monthly customization. The app will also simplify grocery shopping by allowing users to order essentials online or providing an in-person shopping list. Employing cutting-edge AR and AI technology, the app will empower users to scan their kitchen ingredients, suggesting recipes based on what's available. Our ultimate goal is to debunk the myths of time-consuming and complex cooking, encouraging healthier eating habits and a more sustainable lifestyle for young adults and adults.
Feature Prioritization:
Based on our understanding of the problem statement in hand, keeping in mind our research findings, we carried out multiple rounds of brainstorming sessions both within our team and outside it. Over 40 different ideas surfaced up, having a varied field of features. Finally, we finalised on the following features:
1. Personalized Meal Plans:
Feature Solution: Personalized meal plans cater to the nutritional knowledge gap and busy lifestyles of young adults. By offering customized meal plans based on individual preferences, restrictions, budget limitations, and health goals, this feature addresses the need for a practical and tailored approach to healthy eating, preventing misconceptions about food and encouraging informed choices.
2. Grocery Shopping Assistance:
Feature Solution: Grocery shopping assistance helps users overcome the challenge of feeling unsure about what ingredients to buy and how to execute cooking procedures. By generating organized grocery lists based on the recipes they choose, this feature ensures users have access to the right ingredients within their budget, addressing the barrier of limited access to proper recipes and grocery lists.
3. Calorie Tracking:
Feature Solution: Calorie tracking provides essential dietary metrics, including calorie counts and macronutrient breakdowns, which empowers users with information for each meal. This addresses the nutritional knowledge gap by offering insights into the nutritional content of meals, promoting informed food choices, and preventing misconceptions about healthy food.
4. Recipe Recommendations:
Feature Solution: Recipe recommendations offer a selection of recipes with step-by-step instructions and comprehensive ingredient lists. By providing easy-to-follow recipes, this feature assists users in preparing healthier meals at home, combating the belief that cooking at home is time-consuming and difficult. It promotes the adoption of healthier diets and addresses the challenge of refraining from home cooking.
Each of these features contributes to a comprehensive solution that empowers young adults to incorporate healthy eating patterns into their lifestyles, reducing the risk of prediabetes and type 2 diabetes. By addressing the identified problem space, these features promote informed choices, dispel misconceptions, facilitate convenient grocery shopping, and offer practical meal planning solutions.
Surveys and Interviews:
We conducted interviews of 10 participants, performed observations, and conducted surveys to understand lifestyle of young adults and their perception about health and long term goals. Our survey on people aged between 18 to 34 revealed that a vast majority of them wanted to improve their eating habits, reduce consumption of sugar and unhealthy snacks and practice portion control but, most of them feel that healthy food is expensive, and is difficult and time consuming to cook at home.
Problem Space Exploration:
For this project, we were suppose to take up a problem space that falls in one of the three IU grand challenge domains. The Indiana University (IU) Grand Challenges program is a strategic initiative designed to address critical problems facing Indiana and beyond through large-scale, focused, and measurable initiatives collaborating with state, business, and nonprofit leaders, to tackle pressing issues.
One of the prominent initiatives within this program is the Precision Health Initiative (PHI), which focuses on advancing precision medicine to develop individualized treatments for diseases like cancer, Type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer's, ultimately improving the health and well-being of the state's residents. The program underscores IU's commitment to making a tangible impact on the lives of Hoosiers. Two of my teammates were from health informatics major, so collectively, we were inclined towards this domain.
We began exploring the space around diabetes, a condition affecting the body's regulation of glucose, with 37.3 million people in the US (11.3% of the population) affected. We explored its types and impact. Type 1 diabetes is characterized by the pancreas failing to produce insulin. Prediabetes is a forewarning where blood sugar levels are elevated, often caused by sedentary lifestyles and unhealthy eating habits, affecting 96 million adults. Type 2 diabetes occurs when the body's cells become resistant to insulin, primarily due to lifestyle choices, and the incidence in young adults aged 15 to 39 has risen by 56% from 1990 to 2019. Young adults, particularly from minority backgrounds, are at higher risk, with predictions of a 675% increase in Type 2 diabetes in this group by 2060 if current trends persist.
The problem of diabetes and the affected demographic is very broad. Thus, to provide effective solution, we narrowed down our focus on young adults aging between 19-34. Nearly 1 in 4 of them have prediabetes consequently, they are prone to type 2 diabetes. Moreover, Type 2 diabetes progression has been found to be rapid among young adults.
This problem space underscores the urgent need for early intervention and lifestyle changes to combat the rising prevalence of diabetes, especially among young individuals. It felt like a problem that resonated with our young hearts and was worth addressing considering its gravity.
Preventing diabetes is a worthy problem to address because it's a prevalent chronic disease in Indiana, leading to significant healthcare costs and being one of the top causes of death. By developing prevention strategies, it can improve public health, save lives, and reduce healthcare expenses.
Nutrimate
Personalized Meal Planner
Dive into the Case Study
IU Grand Challenges
Diabetes Prevention
Team of 4
2 Months
Moreover, our interviews revealed that their busy, engaging lifestyles, tendency of being prone to get influence by convenient rather than nutritious dietary choices, challenges faced and misconceptions revolving around meal planning and home cooking, and lack of customization and frustrating subscription models in the existing health applications become barriers in their health journeys. Evidently, young adults are willing to bring a change but they do not have the right tools and guidance to achieve that change.
As a participant in my MSHCI program, our team of four embarked on a compelling UX design project that encompassed the entire design cycle, meticulously documenting our progress with weekly deliverables. While the problem space was flexible, we were presented with three domains to select from. Over the span of two months, we adeptly crafted three significant deliverables culminating in a final presentation that encapsulated the fruits of our labor.
This endeavor, however, left an indelible mark on my trajectory as a designer. It illuminated the intricate challenges associated with adhering to stringent deadlines within a collaborative team setting, emphasizing the delicate balance between effective teamwork and individual accountability. The pivotal revelation was understanding the paramount importance of championing a meaningful problem space, substantiated by impactful research, and articulating a succinct problem statement that could withstand scrutiny at every stage.
Moreover, the experience honed my ability to navigate through continuous feedback, discerning what to incorporate and what to discard. Above all, it instilled in me the art of crafting solutions that seamlessly align with the meticulously defined problem statement.
What Led Me Here?
Wireframing and Prototyping:
Our brainstorming sessions were a thrilling journey beyond the confines of current technology, unleashing our collective creativity. Collaborating with our teammates led to the birth of remarkable concepts that transcended our individual imaginations. We combined insights from two sessions to lay a solid foundation for the third. The initial brainstorming sessions allowed our ideas to roam freely, unhindered by the pressure of immediate solutions. The sketch deliverable from the second session, focusing on Meal Planning, acted as a catalyst, enriching our ideas further.
After these invigorating brainstorming sessions, we honed our concepts, concentrating on pragmatic solutions to tackle the problem at hand. Our vision for future brainstorming sessions includes casting a wider net, involving more participants, even seeking input from strangers, knowing that a diverse pool leads to an ocean of creative solutions.
Ultimately, we emerged with three standout ideas that we believe effectively address our challenge. These concepts shone amidst the brainstorming brilliance:
Testing:
The Nutrimate meal planning app underwent a thorough evaluation process, combining expert assessments and user feedback to analyze its functionality. Users engaged in realistic tasks through think-aloud sessions, while usability and design experts conducted heuristic evaluations. The key findings from these evaluations include:
1. Complex Onboarding Process: Criticized for its complexity, the onboarding process may overwhelm new users. Streamlining the initial experience into concise stages is recommended for improved user-friendliness.
2. Lack of Confirmation Feedback:The absence of confirmation feedback post-task completion was noted. Integrating clear message notifications at crucial points is suggested to enhance user confidence.
3. Challenges in Recipe Instructions: Relying solely on text-based instructions presents challenges, especially for less experienced users. The proposal is to introduce concise video tutorials to complement textual guidance and enhance overall user understanding.
4. Inefficient Ingredient Substitution:Users expressed frustration with the app's current methods for substituting ingredients in recipes. Improving the feature's usability is essential to boost user satisfaction and flexibility.
Future Directions:
Continuous refinement based on user feedback.
Implementation of recommended enhancements and rigorous testing.
Consideration for moving the app to production post-integration of improvements and validation through testing.
Additional evaluations, particularly with a diverse user group, are deemed crucial before significant design changes.
Elements to Preserve:
Core concept of personalized meal planning and visually appealing user interface will remain unchanged.
Key Learnings
Participating in the MSHCI program, my transformative journey as a UX designer was profoundly shaped by the intricate dance between time constraints and collaborative synergy. The experience illuminated the delicate equilibrium required to thrive within a team, emphasizing the fine line between collective innovation and individual accountability. It underscored the significance of meticulously selecting a problem space, urging me to delve beyond the superficial and champion causes that resonate deeply. The paramount revelation was the critical interplay between meaningful research and the articulation of a robust problem statement—fundamental pillars that sustained scrutiny throughout the design cycle.
Navigating through the vast landscape of competitive and comparative research unearthed the limitations of existing initiatives to combat diabetes. This realization kindled a passion for leveraging technology to bridge gaps, highlighting the imperative to innovate beyond conventional solutions. The heart of the matter, however, lay in the profound connections forged during surveys and interviews. Engaging with the aspirations, challenges, and misconceptions of young adults illuminated the human aspect of design. Crafting solutions became not just about functionality but about addressing the nuanced emotional landscape—transforming barriers into opportunities and empowering users to navigate the journey toward healthier lifestyles with authenticity and empathy. The synthesis of these insights into feature prioritization and subsequent prototyping encapsulates a holistic approach, where design is not merely a process but a conduit for understanding, empathy, and positive societal impact.
Mockups and Hi-Fidelity Prototypes:
The project employed a diverse set of prototyping methods, beginning with a brainstorming session to generate ideas. The team then utilized paper sketches to explore concepts and user flows efficiently, ensuring a broad range of individual perspectives. Through group discussion, they selected the most promising flow for user experience and functionality. Transitioning to the digital realm, the team used Figma for high-fidelity prototypes due to its familiar interface and real-time collaboration features.
In Figma, the team adopted a stepped approach to building high-fidelity prototypes, starting with mid-fidelity wireframes and gradually incorporating visual elements like branding and graphics. The upfront definition of reusable components ensured consistency in the prototype's look and feel. The prototyping process was smooth and efficient, with the early paper sketches playing a crucial role in shaping subsequent phases.
The decision to use a phased prototyping approach allowed for quick idea generation and testing through low-fidelity sketches, followed by the development of higher fidelity prototypes. Despite time constraints, the team expressed a desire to invest more effort in iterating on low-fidelity prototypes and conducting user testing for further refinement. The success of the approach led the team to commit to using this method in future projects, recognizing the combined value of low and high-fidelity prototyping in informing design decisions and gathering early feedback.