help college students naturally motivate themselves to build and maintain habits that balance school, work, and personal life?
Project Background
Navigating the transition to independent living can be daunting, especially when it comes to meal planning and maintaining a healthy diet. Fresh Start is a mobile app designed to support young adults as they embark on this new chapter, offering a guided, step-by-step journey into the world of cooking and meal planning.
Inspired by the challenges faced by friends who actually struggled to maintain a healthy weight after moving out for college, Fresh Start was crafted to make healthy eating accessible, enjoyable, and sustainable for those just beginning their culinary adventure.
University of Washington Bothell
Interaction Designer
Visual Designer
Objectives
Introduction
My inspiration for this project stemmed from seeing friends struggle with healthy eating after moving out for college. I wondered why existing meal planning apps weren’t making a meaningful difference for their target users and set out to design something that would not only truly help them build sustainable, healthy eating habits but also make it easy to start and stick with the process.
Competitive Analysis
I began my journey by investigating the gaps in current solutions. There are numerous meal planning apps on the market, but preliminary research narrowed our options down to the five most relevant. After some quick research into what my friends would look for in such an app, I have also arrived at the 8 meal planning app features below.
The three most unsupported features across all apps seem to be:
User Needs Analysis
Most of the apps require demanded a subscription without giving the chance to try the app for free. Yummly was one of the few apps that offer a free trial period, so I decided to have some college students accomplish a task within the app.
THE TASK
Go through the app's onboarding process and find a healthy recipe with your personal dietary needs that you would actually try.
User Needs Statements
Based on takeaways from testing, I got together with my design cohort at UWB and generated some user needs statements.
Problem
At least 3 of my close friends and acquaintances from high school directly suffered from malnourishment due to bad meal planning when they moved abroad and lived on their own.
Current solutions severely lack the approachableness and proper incentives that would drive people like my friends — who are new to being responsible for their own meals — to maintain a healthy weight after moving out for college.
Problem Statement
How might we facilitate young adults to maintain a healthy diet when they’ve moved out and are responsible for planning their own meals?
Personas
To help me make sure I cater for all the pain points and user needs I've found so far, I condensed all the findings into one primary and one secondary persona. They will serve as a reference and foundation for all the designs I create.
Primary Persona
Secondary Persona
Design Ideation
To kick things off, I referred to the three most unsupported features I found across popular meal planning apps and focused on ideating new solutions, all while keeping the personas who will be using this new tool in the center of my designs.
No grocery and pantry integration
Include built-in shopping and pantry list that can be used to filter recipes
No social sharing and collaboration
Enable people to post creations and ask/answer questions about recipe
No pre-built meal plans
Introduce "Courses," a curated series of recipes to follow for days
Information Architecture
With a vision in mind I began laying out what the app needed in a hierarchy adopted from existing related apps. As seen below, I initially included too many features and lost focus on the app’s purpose, despite having gathered valuable insights.
User Flow Diagram
Along with the information architecture, I created a user flow diagram to visualize how users would navigate the app. However, similar to the IA diagram, I ended up slightly overcomplicating things.
Wireframes & Sketches
Despite the initial design being unintentionally unapproachable and overly complicated, I sketched some interface ideas to give the concept shape. I then had a few users, including my UX design professor, Vu Chu, review these sketches for feedback. It was positively brutal.
Iteration
It was only through feedback that I realized the number of things I overlooked. I realize how I've fallen victim to "I am my own user" at this step, but fortunately iterating is always an option, and I didn't stop here. Here are the pieces of feedback I got, summarized:
Problem Re-statement
How might we make the experience of learning how to plan nutritious meals more enjoyable for young adults?
Low-Fidelity Prototype
After reforming the problem statement, gaining user-centered realization, and snapping back to my original vision, I restructured the app's interface with a low-fidelity interactive prototype on Figma.
Iteration, again
Of course, this still isn't the final step. After redesigning most of the app, I need more feedback to make sure I'm actually doing it better this time, especially before committing to more finalized designs; and whaddayaknow, I'm almost there!
In this round of feedback, I found four semi-related areas to improve on for the final design.
Final Designs
After over six weeks of iterating, gathering feedback, and refining, I finally reached a point where I felt confident in finalizing the design for this project’s scope. With a high-fidelity prototype to deliver, I made sure to incorporate all the feedback I had received while staying true to the objectives and motivations I set at the beginning.
Photo-sharing puts positive pressure on users to cook along and make their own attempt. It also gives users the opportunity to show and share personal creations, and seeing how others have made the unknown less intimidating. Users can also give and get support by inviting each other to meal plans.
Users can choose their preferences and restrictions during onboarding with a few taps. They can also follow cuisine categories that would personalize what they see on their recipe feed. Finally, users can find out what they can make by adding the ingredients they have at home to the app's pantry.
A discussion forum for each recipe allows users to help each other out and connect as part of a community. Progress tracking with milestones adds value to growth, and is paired with difficulty ratings for each recipe to ensure a pleasant gradual progression in the user's skills.
Users can take advantage of grocery list and spending tracker to easily view their expenses in one place. The app also offers meal Courses that plan a user's weekend, week, or even month, gradually increasing in difficulty as they gain experience, allowing them to become familiar with real meal planning over time.
Takeaways
This project marked a pivotal moment in my design journey, reminding me that I am not my own user and shouldn't cling to my designs like they're my own creations. It also made me realize the deeper essence of UX design by revealing that it goes beyond what’s visible on the interface. The interface is just a facilitator, and what truly matters are the underlying concepts — What motivates the user? How do specific interactions make them feel? How will they actually perceive the experience I intended for them?
Next Steps
This is as far as the project's scope has allowed me to get. This prototype is only partially functional and is only a proof of concept for main flows and features as a UX design project. The design system used for this project in Figma could use some optimization — currently not every repeating element is made into a component — and many of the design's smaller features remain uncriticized and could benefit from some AB testing. It would be interesting to eventually be able to launch a fully working version of this app, especially since its inspiration came from a real-world problem!
Other Case Studies
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