FoodSub
Healthy fast food options to be easily available
About the Project
Our main aim was to understand the impact of food on people's health and their lives. Even though the importance of health has been imbibed in every one of us since childhood it is still the biggest concern in the world.
From that, we found that the national health and nutrition examination survey says that around 37% of people in America eat fast food which is about 85 million people in a day. Thus we started to focus on adults and the fast food culture in the U.S.
Problem Statement
How might we help people avoid eating Fast Food and help them make healthier choices?
3 Months
Duration
4 design students
Team
UX Designer
My Role
Adobe XD, Miro, FigJam
Tools
Design Process
User Research
Define
Ideation
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Research
8 out of 10
people in the united states eat fast food once in a month, and 47% eat fast food once a week or more
22.7% Breakfast
43.7% Lunch
42% Dinner
Percentage of fast food meals commonly consumed everyday by people
We began our research to explore about food, advantages, disadvantages, and addictions. That is when we came across people's routine of eating food, especially fast food. Then we started to dig deep into fast foods topic before even deciding upon the problems that needed to be addressed. While exploring more about fast food we thought of changing our perspective to eating healthy food as well as their eating habits and then we decided to discover more about it. In this initial phase, we conducted a secondary review, observations, and interviews to find out more about it.
Secondary Research
To understand how fast food is affecting people in the US we did secondary research by going through different research papers that have tried to understand this issue. We then came across the below mentioned information that provided more insights to us.
Observations and Interviews
We conducted 8 observations at various food joints such as Subway, Blaze Pizza, Papa Johns's, IUPUI Campus center food court (Chick-Fil-A, Panda Express), Starbucks, and a confectionary store called Rocket Fizz. We then prepared an interview protocol according to the data gathered during secondary research and observations and went out to interview 8 people in total.
Insights from Observations and Interviews
Some people tend to go for healthy options but eventually pair them up with fast food items.
Easy availability of intended food items and time constraints are factors that restrict people from changing their food goals.
There is a sense of unavailability as people are unaware of local food options especially when they relocate to new places.
People like to have their own choice of food mainly because of their taste preferences and satisfaction with hunger.
Identified Problems
Choice of food has more priority
Desire to eat a food item
Compromising to eat in order to cook
Habit of eating fast food
Aware of fast foods cons
Lack of control over their food
Availability problems based on different factors
Not taking health as a first priority
Storyboards
Figure - Use case scenario for Ramsay
Figure - Use case scenario for Terese
Final Design Solution
Foodsub's aim is to provide healthy food substitutes to users helping them make conscious choices as they ate fast food
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FoodSub is a food ordering mobile application.
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Suggests nutrient-rich substitutes by taking information from the user about their dietary preferences.
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Then provides selected food items tailored to their preferences, needs, and restaurant availability.
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Also provides additional information about the benefits and nutritional facts of nutrient-rich food items.
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Additional rewards are also presented, associated with the substitutes.
Paper Prototypes
Healthy food indication
Figure - Search results screen
Figure - Restaurant screen
Figure - Nutritional details screen
Substitute options
Figure - Select options screen
Figure - Option 1 screen
Figure - Option 2 screen
Related features
Figure - My cart screen
Figure - Order placed screen
Figure - My coins screen
Solution
The design solution is being addressed through a mobile application called “FoodSub”. It is a food ordering mobile application and it aims at providing healthy food substitutes to users helping them make conscious choices as they eat fast food, tailored to their preferences.
High-fidelity Prototypes
By testing our low-fidelity paper prototypes with some users, we got many insights, and those incorporated them to form our final high-fidelity prototypes.
Onboarding
Food-related information of the user is taken to help determine what kind of choices can be provided.
Healthy heart symbol
The green heart symbol identifies that the restaurant has nutritional-rich healthy options available.
Healthy heart symbol in relation to coins
The green heart symbol is clickable indicating that a food item is a healthy option in that restaurant and coins are rewarded to the user if they buy that healthy food option.
Nutritional Information
The green heart symbol when clicked opens this pop-up that provides all nutritional-related details about that food item.
Options for substitution
This provides a way to check out more nutrition-rich options without a need to compromise on your taste by selecting from either of the two options.
Substituting food item
This option provides suggestions for whole food items with healthy and nutritive-rich alternates according to the availability in the restaurant.
Substituting food item ingredients
This option provides suggestions for the food item's ingredients with healthy and nutritive-rich alternates according to the availability in the restaurant.
Rewards
The rewards i.e. my coins screen provide in detail history about the restaurant from which they received the coins and other offers to redeem.
Ideation
This is the most crucial stage as it helped us to define insights gathered from our user research.
We performed Affinity mapping by consolidating the data gathered from secondary reviews, observations, and interviews onto the MIRO board.While grouping we were able to find similar patterns and classify them accordingly. This helped us frame our key problems.
We also created an Empathy map in order to focus on the user's thoughts, feelings, statements, and other related mannerisms.
Figure - Empathy map on MIRO board
Figure - Affinity Mapping on MIRO board
Usability Evaluation
Heuristic evaluations were done as a part of self-reflective evaluations. Along with this, to get a real-world user's point of view, we also did the Think Aloud evaluation exercise with four users.
Heuristic evaluation
We followed Jacob Neilson’s 10 heuristic principles for evaluating our application. Here are the passes and falls of the application.
Less jargon used
Good Consistency
Aesthetic and minimalist design
What was liked
Error prevention
No help and introductions about new features
Less flexible to use
What needs to be improved
Think Aloud
We performed the Think-Aloud activity where the users were briefly explained the application goals and asked to talk about every thought and decision while performing the steps.
The question format needs to be clear and suggestive.
Unable to recognize the relation between coins and healthy heart symbol.
Substituting a dish was not understood while selecting that option.
Information about a healthy food item was very helpful and different
The heart icon was interpreted as favorites and the coins icon was interpreted as ratings.
Discrepancies between the written statements in the application and the user's interpretations.
Outcomes
Personas
Using affinity mapping and empathy maps, we were able to put together 2 personas based on the insights gathered from them. It also helped us shape 2 kinds of users in order to address our key problems.
Brainstorming and Ideation
We performed the brainstorming activity in 3 sessions:
Individually
01
02
Within the team members
03
With another team who did not know in depth about our project
In all the sessions we generated many ideas with a broad scope. This collection of solution ideas was narrowed down on the basis of 3 requirements:
User's pain points as mentioned in both the personas
01
Technological feasibility
02
Economic feasibility
03
Our requirements made us decide what pain points should be addressed in our solution. We decided to focus on the following:
Availability of nutrition - rich food
01
Variety of options
02
Change in people's habits
03
Awarness
04
Figure - Brainstorming different ideas for the solution
Figure - Brainstorming different ideas for the solution