Ehabit
Eating healthy is one of the best things you can do for your health. It gives you more energy in your day-to-day life and can affect your mental health. Diet is one of the biggest factors people can change to make an improvement in their quality of life, both daily and long term.
In order to help young adults form and keep healthy eating habits, I initiated this App called “Ehabit“.
My involvements in this project include conducting user interviews and card sorting, designing low-fidelity and high-fidelity interfaces, prototyping interactions, and iterating user flow.
User-Centered Design
Time Frame
Role
Involvement
2022.6-2022.11
UI/UX Designer, Usability Researcher
User Journey Map, Wireframing, Usability Testing, Iconography Design
In this App, I’m aiming to help young adults form and keep healthy eating habits as well as help and enable them to plan and record healthy diets.
Project
Self-initiated
>> Takeaways
Overview
>> Research
Busy young singles fail to maintain healthy long-term diets
1, Hard to change current lifestyles
Current lifestyles change is complicated and complex because it requires a person to disrupt a current habit while simultaneously fostering a new, possibly unfamiliar, set of actions. This series of action always take longer than our expectation.
2, Too busy to plan or record every meal
Meal planning and recording require that you be somewhat organized. Trying to put together a plan when you have no idea where all your favorite recipes are or what you ate in the last month is going to make things much more difficult.
3, Easily affected by others in social life
We eat differently when we are with other people compared with when we eat alone. Our dietary choices also tend to converge with those of our close social connections. One reason for this is that conforming to the behavior of others is adaptive and we find it rewarding.
Solutions
Start little
The key to succeeding long-term is to set small, achievable short-term goals instead of extravagant goals that will leave you feeling overwhelmed and hopeless.
Breaking or forming new habits with drastic changes is not sustainable or realistic. Instead, take baby steps to help you ease into a healthier diet by focusing on accomplishing little habits that are more doable.
Automatically meal recommend/record
Holding yourself accountable for what you eat is a great way to raise awareness of yourself, and the amount of calories, protein, fat, and carbohydrates.
Scientifically generate healthy recipes and menus according to the ingredients you have. Choose like or dislike depending on your choices, the app will record and calculate the calories and nutrition automatically.
Set up community and leaderboard
Emphasizing the healthy eating intentions and behaviors of others may be beneficial in bringing about dietary change.
Share healthy lives with each other in your community. See who did a good job of keeping and forming good habits and supervising each other.
Process Overview
01.Research
02.Synthesize
03.Ideate
04.Design&Test
Interview
Competitor Analysis
User Pain Points
Persona
HMW Question
User Goal
Visualizing Concept
Usability Test
Improvements & Iterations
Final Product
Style Guide
01.
RESEARCH
User Interview
I interviewed 11 target audiences about their eating habits and living patterns. During this interview, my goal is mainly to make sure most of my target audience are facing the problem of eating healthily and have tried to adjust in their daily lives. Furthermore, I asked them about what healthy eating habits are in their opinions and how did they do to keep healthy in the past. (Click pic for details)
After analyzing and concluding all the answers, this is what I got:
People feel frustrated when
Cannot change my habit
Dine out frequently eating unhealthy food
Eat on time
Irregular amount and nutrition
Not eat on time
People would like to
Form long term habit
Plan ahead every meal
Amount controlled & nutritional balanced
Competitive Analysis
FatSecret offers an easy to use food diary for you to track as well as plan in advance what you’re going to eat. Image recognition of food and meals make it even easier to add what you’re eating, with a community that’s keen to advise on how best to proceed. A weight tracking tool, along with barcode scanning, rounds off the package.
YAZIO offers a personal plan for losing weight or building muscles, before allowing you to track the nutritional elements of your meal. You can create meal plans, track your calories and daily steps taken, as well as sync up with other fitness apps.
Lose It! wants you to lose weight while also enjoying the process. Simply telling it a little about yourself, it’ll devise a custom weight loss plan, setting you a daily budget and goal to aim for.
From the people behind Livestrong.com, MyPlate Calorie Tracker hopes to be the most user-friendly option for losing weight. The app helps you find out which foods you eat contain the most calories, allowing you to set personalized daily calorie goals.
UI unfriendly
Not focus on nutrition
No community to follow
Hard to persist
No reminder/tracking
Type in lots of info
Don’t want to start
Inconvenient
All the apps are too focus on calories counting and controlling. In this case, I want to make a healthy diet app focusing on habit forming.
User Pain Points
Hard to change their current lifestyles >>>> Easily give up when trying to eat healthily.
Too busy for eating plan in each meal >>>> Grab the convenient food nearby.
Too lazy for recording each meal >>>> Nutritional unbalanced and amount uncontrolled.
Cannot give up social life with friends >>>> Easily affected by others and dine out.
02.
SYNTHESIZE
Persona
Lynn / 24 years old / Software developer
Live alone
Busy with a tight schedule
Irregular and chaotic daily schedule
No time to prepare meals on weekdays
Want to learn how to cook healthily
Live in the city
— — “I really want to form and keep a healthy diet“
HMW Questions
How might we help young adults who have a tight and chaotic schedule to form and keep healthier eating diets and lifestyles?
03.
IDEATE
Design Goal
Based on the research and synthesizes before, here are the goals I am helping my target audience to achieve:
Start little and maintain it as a long-term habit.
Suggest each meal professionally and well-balanced in nutrition and amount.
Provide community and leaderboards to help encourage and supervise each other.
Start Little
Long-term Habit
Amount/nutrition Balanced
Community
Visualizing Concept
04.
DESIGN&TEST
Major Improvements and Iterations
Based on 4 rounds of usability tests as well as mentor feedback and previous peer reviews, I iterated my design several times over the time span of 3 weeks. Here are some major changes:
1
2
4
5
Provide recommendations for little habit
Based on feedback from the first usability test, testers suggested that there should have “recommendations “ for little habits.
Recommendation bar and Set Up bar should be parallel in the interface.
Move meal choice and check-in to the home page
Original design was to check your little habits after clicking into the “habit bar“. Also, choose which meal you have after clicking into the “meal bar“.
After usability tests, I moved the check-in button to the home page as well as listed out different meal choices on the home page in order to make everything visible, workable, and clear at the first glance.
Change calendar to journey in the navigation tab
Originally designed a calendar tab to collect data on little habits and meals respectively from time to time.
After rounds of peer reviews, I received the suggestion that should combine little habits and meals together in order to show the overall improvements and performance of the user. So I changed the calendar tab to the journey.
Add leaderboards to community and remove featured scientific articles
In the first few rounds, I designed a catchy space for featured scientific articles.
Upon feedback from mentors, the main goal for the community is to help users encourage and supervise each other in their social circle. Therefore, I add in leaderboards from different dimensions and delete featured articles.
3
Adjust filter and thumbnail image according to usability tests
Originally the order of filters and information in the thumbnails are predicted by me and the interviews.
After several rounds of usability tests toward target users about “how do you prioritize these filters“, I finally rearrange the filters and manage the information as well as their sizes again.
Final Product
Onboarding: Guide me through
A warm welcoming sign-in page together with a neat and clear survey provide you with a customized app and customized features
Start little: Set my own habits
Feel free to add in your little habits with details and repeat time! Keep checking in and follow what you want to do to form long-term habits.
Recommend: Suggest little habits for you
If you don’t have any ideas for adding little habits, don’t worry, here we provided with tons of suggested habits that are easy to follow and great to form.
My meals: Recipes generator
It’s great and necessary to record everyday healthy meals. This feature helps you when you have no idea about making meals at home. You can easily become your the chef of yourself by following all kinds of the healthy recipe provided here.
My meals: Dine out can also be a choice
Dining out with junk food or fast food frequently can cause big problems. This feature provides you with different filters that you can choose from when you are browsing and deciding which one you should go with.
My journey: Collecting my data
In my journey, you can clearly view your everyday nutrition input and calories. As well as the recording of checking in little habits. There will also be a library for your medals for accomplishing different goals.
Community and Leaderboard
Sharing your healthy life with friends is the most happiness moment! That is also a good way to help supervise each other. At the same time, we can also find out who did a good job in a certain field. Tips: the leaderboard content can be changed!
Style Guide
Reflections and Takeaway
Never assume
This is a first end-to-end full track user-centered design project that I did by myself, so I gained lots of experience and learned a lot from this case. One of the most impressive one is never assume your users. I always like to come up with as much as ideas in the ideate phase, in order to fill my project with tons of creativity and message. However, we are always designing for others, not ourselves. It is the most important task to listen to the users themselves. Furthermore, don’t try to lead or persuade your users during the interview, even it would be unintentional, only in this case, the results can turn out to be true and fair. I’m pretty excited about the final products, especially all the improvements I’ve made during the whole process.