HealthFull

Experts agree that nutrition and a proper diet are essential for people to maximize their fitness goals.

Despite this people agree that eating healthy and keeping a nutritious and proper diet is time consuming and difficult. Living a healthy lifestyle isn't easy, and the most challenging part is learning the habits of healthy eating and good nutrition. HealthFull aims to help alleviate these issues.

The idea was an app that took the users' fitness goals and information and built strategic meal plans to help them achieve their goals. The UX process was an exercise in Lean UX and was an opportunity to learn a new methodology for creating mobile designs.

How do we make eating well easier?

Why do you want to eat healthier?
What is stopping you from doing so?
What features would be useful in a nutritional app?
What would be necessary for the app to encourage users to reach their fitness goals? What are the main struggles with eating healthy?

I interviewed eight people, ages 22-48, from varying economic backgrounds. All had a desire to increase the number of healthy meals they ate or add variety to the healthy meals they already made for themselves. Using the information I gathered from their answer I developed the following personas.

What stops people from eating better?

Building meal plans made easy

Critical Features :

create an account
personalized meal planning and shopping list
search function to find healthy alternatives to specific meals
nutritional info clearly displayed for each recipe
a goal input to tailor the app to best suit user's needs.

Tailoring a meal plan to the user is key.

The onboarding of the app gathers all the users information to determine their Estimated Energy Requirement or the ideal number of calories for them in a given day.

After doing research on nutritional planning in fitness, I determined designing the apps meal planning around EER was the best way to tailor plans to a users goal with an easy onboarding process.

Users basic body info is combined with their activity levels to determine their proper calorie intake.

The five distinct activity levels are the common range for all EER calculators.

Finally after a user inputs their health and activity info they can select from the three most common fitness goals.

Gain muscle mass
Maintain current fitness
Lose Weight

A specific goal will then tailor the users EER as necessary to enhance their nutritional success as well as determine the appropriate nutrient percentage (i.e. proteins, fats, carbs, etc) for the users nutritional planning.

Final Designs

Results

Implementing the Lean UX methodology to build a project was an interesting process. I was able to learn and adjust the app rather quickly through constantly testing the product after each set of major adjustments I made.

Usability testing yielded positive feedback with 87% of users stating the process of personalizing meal plans to themselves was simple and quick, as such they were likely to use the app for recipes and nutritional planning.

If I ever revisited this project to expand further, I would try to include better accessibility to the app, including designing a text to speech function to better assist users who may have a difficult time reading the recipes.

I would say my greatest takeaway was the use of Lean UX to assist the designer and his team in learning quickly and addressing problems in a swift manner. I believe the final product was one that would successfully assist the user in implementing a healthier diet into their lifestyle and, based on tests, was useful, usable and valuable.