The Challenge
The primary challenge was to design a mobile app that addresses students' difficulties in adopting and maintaining a healthy diet. This involved: • Understanding User Needs: Identifying the specific pain points, motivations, and behaviours of the target audience (young professionals and students) regarding their eating habits and wellness goals through user research. • Simplifying Complexity: Making complex nutritional information and tracking processes accessible and easy to understand for users with varying levels of nutritional knowledge. • Maintaining Engagement: Creating an engaging and motivating experience encourages consistent use and helps users stay committed to their goals over time. • Providing Personalized Guidance: Offering tailored meal suggestions, educational content, and progress tracking based on individual goals and preferences. • Balancing Features: Integrating essential features like calorie tracking and meal planning without overwhelming the user with excessive complexity.
The Solution
After the conclusion, I designed an app that offers a comprehensive and user-centric solution to the challenges of eating well through a combination of intuitive features and mindful design. So I broke down step-by-step: • Seamless Onboarding: A welcoming and personalized onboarding process that allows users to define their goals, dietary preferences, and activity levels, setting the stage for a tailored experience. • Effortless Calorie & Macro Tracking: An intuitive interface for logging meals with options for manual entry, searching a food database, and potentially barcode scanning, providing a clear overview of daily nutritional intake. • Personalized Meal Planning & Recipe Discovery: A feature that offers tailored meal suggestions and access to a diverse library of healthy recipes, catering to individual dietary needs and preferences, thus overcoming the challenge of finding healthy meal ideas. • Progress Visualization & Motivation: Clear and visually appealing progress trackers and charts that allow users to monitor their journey towards their goals, fostering motivation and a sense of accomplishment. • Educational Resources (Mind & Body): Integrated access to curated insights and articles on topics related to mindful eating, stress management, healthy habits, and sleep, empowering users with knowledge to make informed choices. • Optional Social Features (Conceptual): The potential for community building and shared progress to further enhance motivation and support. • User-Centric Design: A clean, modern dark mode interface with clear navigation and a focus on usability, ensuring a positive and engaging user experience. • Conclusion: Informed by research with students and young professionals, iHealthy was designed to empower them to build sustainable healthy habits, ultimately fostering their overall wellness.
