Mobile UX/UI Design
Qeats
Timeline
Sep. - Dec. 2019
Role
Individual project for thesis project
Tools
Pen & paper, SurveyMonkey, Xmind, Sketch, InVision Studio
Qeats is a concept for an app designed to make a healthy diet easier and more accessible. I designed this app from scratch, including defining problems, conducting user research, wireframing, and visual design, etc. This is an individual project for my thesis project.
Background
With the increasingly faster modern life pace and greater pressure, young people have paid more attention to their career or study than a healthy diet, which is proved by the rise of the take-out food industry. Besides a healthy diet, many people do not have a healthy way of exercise, resulting in the occurrence of more and more people having health problems. Diet and disease are closely related, and having a healthy and reasonable diet is crucial to improving the quality of life. The diet APPs on the current market only have simple functions such as recipe sharing or food delivery, but fail to offer convenience in multiple dimensions of a healthy diet, such as nutrient intake recording, recipe teaching, meal preparation, and ingredients ordering.
With this in mind, I arrived at a core question:
How might we enable users to have a faster and healthier diet and keep abreast of the health status of the diet?
The Proposal
I propose to design an App that would provide recipes based on users' health needs, offer fresh ingredients box and pre-cooked meal box, and allow users to record daily nutritional intake.
Value Proposition - Why should it be made?
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Habit-forming Utility. After using the Qeats App for a period of time, users will develop a habit of healthy eating and a habit of recording daily intake. In the process of long-term use of this app, users will learn what diet structure is suitable for them. Qeats educates users invisibly, improves their eating habits, thereby truly helping users solve dietary problems.
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Save time and improve quality of life. As stated by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), The overall obesity rate in the United States is rising year by year, which has a lot to do with diet structure and lifestyle. We all know that healthy eating means eating more vegetables and balanced nutrition, but it takes time to choose the right diet according to personal physical differences. Qeats helps users define their own diet goals and make healthy eating plans based on their goals and preferences. Qeats' ordering service simplifies the process of purchasing grocery while improving the quality of healthy eating.
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Revealing potential inappropriate eating habits. A healthy diet is not just about ingredients, but also a mix of seasonings. It is easy for people to take in too many trace elements every day, and long-term excessive consumption of these elements will affect people's health. For example, according to research from WHO, High sodium intake (which easily consumes through salt) contributes to high blood pressure, which in turn increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. Qeats provides quantitative ingredients and seasonings and records daily nutrients facts to help users keeping their nutrients intake on track.
Target Audience Groups
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Primary:
Office workers and white-collar workers aged 25-40, who are busy with work, paying more attention to healthy eating as they grow older, but have no time to arrange healthy eating plans.
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Secondary:
Students aged 15-25, want to keep fit, but with great pressure on the study, have no place and no time to cook and fitness due to restrictions on accommodation.
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Tertiary:
Individuals who want to maintain a healthy diet, but not willing to spend time cooking a healthy diet and doing exercise.
Potential Stakeholders - Who may sponsor my app?
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Health Clubs
It is generally believed that joining the health club, gym or sports center is the first step to improving people's health, but often overlooks the importance of a healthy diet. My product can work with these organizations to provide their members with healthy meals that match the workout plan, to maximize the outcome.
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Food Source Suppliers
With the improvement of people's quality of life, people's pursuit of diet is no longer just full, but a more healthy diet and a reliable source of food. Nowadays, more and more companies are beginning to focus on improving the quality of people's healthy lives. The potential stakeholders can be some direct food suppliers, such as Amazon Fresh, and Whole Foods Delivery. If there is an app that can not only buy reliable and fresh food sources, but also develop a diet plan for users, these products will be more perfect.
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Food Delivery Services
Another type of stakeholders can be the mainstream take-out food services platform or fitness platform on the current market, they can develop a line of healthy lifestyle that serves people with specific dietary needs, better and more comprehensively serving their existing users.
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Employee Sponsorship
There are some large companies who want their employees to be healthy and thus bring more value to the company. My product can partner with these kinds of corporations to provide employees with healthy employee meals and achieve a win-win situation.
Competitive Analysis
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Sports and fitness
There are many such products on the market, such as “7 minute workout”, “Better me”, “FitOn”, etc. Most fitness products pay more attention to exercise and barely consider diet. However, eating habits are more important. Such apps are not comprehensive, and can just assist in shaping on the basis of a reasonable diet.
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Pre-cooked / Meal preparation
These products such as freshly, EasyEats have pre-cooked meals according to the chef's recipes, or fresh ingredients boxes, delivered to the user's home. However, it requires the users to spend a lot of time thinking about what to eat in order to match their health goals, and check out the food list carefully, which is time-consuming. Qeats allows users to customize recipes based on their health goals and order ingredients directly from reliable sources.
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Dietary record
These products such as Calory are good at recording daily dietary intake, but they require users to record what they've eaten that day. Although it is simple to operate, it requires users to spend their own time figuring out what have they eaten.
I divide the apps that pursue a healthier lifestyle on the market into three major types:
User Research
Research Findings
In this early stage of the survey, I mainly aim to understand the general perception of users about a convenient diet. The survey questions are mainly about the user's daily personal eating habits, designed to understand the user's needs. The survey questions are based on the services provided by the Qeats intended to offer, and the attitude of the user towards a healthy diet. The survey questions include multiple-choice questions, checkbox questions, and short answer questions.
Personas
Going further through the research, 2 main personas were developed based on the user research findings. Each persona has different motivations, goals, and pain points.
User Journey Map
These personas will be helpful to improve the user experience for each one of them. I selected and developed Lisa as the primary typical user and created a user journey map for her, in order to better understand Lisa's pain points and provide design insights and opportunities.
Ideation
Main Features
Qeats addresses these pain points by offering:
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Make meal plans according to user goals
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Make the process of grocery shopping easier
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Recipe recommendation
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Diet and recipe tutorials
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Keep user's daily intake on track
Sitemap
After determining the main features of the app, I created a sitemap in order to understand the hierarchical relationship of each feature in depth. I divided the function into four main sections as 4 tabs at the bottom of the page, with a floating button for the quick log entry.
Wireframe
Based on the sitemap, I made the wireframe to define the functionality at the structural level. Creating a wireframe also helps me to layout the content and design elements in a visual way, which serves a structural guide for subsequent visual design.
Visual Style
Color Palette
The choice of colors.
Large areas of BLUE and PURPLE , reflects health and calmness.
Although warm colors can stimulate consumption, they will increase appetite, so I use the orange-red gradient to highlight some small areas such as buttons to improve CTA.
#8FD1FF #5661F1 #B4EC51 #FB6E75 #F8D047
Context Scenarios
Context Scenario 1 - When and where will Lisa use it?
On Friday night, Lisa wanted to prepare meals for the busy next week. Her medical report from last week showed that she was a bit overweight, but she is busy at work and barely have time to exercise, so she wanted to start losing weight by improving her diet as the first step. She came across the Qeats app, and she decided to give it a try.
Lisa entered her personal information based on Qeats prompts to determine her weight loss goals
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She enjoys cooking by herself more, so she chose to buy fresh ingredients instead of pre-cooked meal box
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After checking out, she started enjoying her weekend
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She used the filter to view the recommended recipes and chose simple dishes that could be completed quickly.
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She ordered a three-day diet plan and planned to receive the parcel before returning home from work on Monday.
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Onboarding
Set up health goals and dietary preference
Sign up with email or Facebook for first-time users
After the registration process is completed, the system will generate Lisa's diet plan based on Lisa's diet preferences and her health goals
Main App - Recipes
Check out recipes and make an order
Context Scenario 2 - How will Lisa use it?
Filters, where users can search recipes by their needs
Choose to buy ingredients, and add all the ingredients to cart
Tab on calendar icon to select exact delivery date
Lisa went home from work on Monday and received the parcel. The ingredients looked fresh with ice packs in the package.
Lisa enters “my order”, selects the corresponding recipe, and prepares to follow the steps in the video to start cooking
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After dinner, Lisa records her dinner intake to make it easier to understand her weight loss goal
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Lisa checked her records for this week and found that she lost 1 kg, which is better than planned. She is very happy and ready to order the next week's meal
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The ingredients provided are complete, the steps are simple and clear, and the video is intuitive. She quickly cooked the dinner and began to enjoy
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The next day, Lisa had the lunch she made the night before and recorded her intake as usual
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Main App - Log
Log daily intake and view history
Main module, users can edit the daily nutrition intake they care about the most and quickly view it through the graph
Log the intake directly from "My Orders", One-click recording, the system calculates calories and nutritional intake of Lisa
Select the meal to record
View nutrition facts
Save&Share
Bottom nav bar includes:
Home; Recipes; +ADD; History and my
After received the ingredients box, enter "my orders" to view the recipe and follow the steps
Quick access from the bottom nav on any page to log water/ food/body index
Quick access to log meals from Daily Goal page
Future Opportunities
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The initial goal of Qeats is to enable users to become familiar with and trust the food service provided by Qeats and become a loyal user of Qeats. In the later stages of product development, after mastering more user bases, we can cooperate with larger organizations and corporations, such as some non-profit organizations, schools, health insurance companies, and so on, to spread the idea of a healthy diet to a wider, older audience.
- With a larger user base, I think it could develop a healthy eating community in the Qeats app, where allows users to share the recipes created by themselves. Qeats can even allow users to share short videos to increase product visibility and attract more users.
- This app mainly provides the functions and services of a healthy diet, but a perfect health system cannot be separated from exercise. In the future, Qeats can work with the fitness app to jointly develop excellent health plans for users, thereby helping more users and increasing more product profits.