HealthyEats Summer 2018

The Task

Healthy Eats is a startup developed by a team that grew out of Princeton the summer of 2018, working to provide a way for people to improve their eating habits in a way that is focused on more than just calorie counting. Ishan Sinha, the founder, asked me to lead the design for their first rollout of the product, so I worked closely with his team to develop comprehensive wireframes and a set of high fidelity mockups. I also created a custom icon set for the project. The market is fairly saturated with dieting apps, so to make it an interesting project, I put a lot of thought into what it would take to make such a product that makes someone feel good about their body. The challenge that persisted throughout the process was how to encourage healthy eating in a way that was cognizant of the ways in which eating is tied up with emotional and mental health. My goal was to use colors, copy, and imagery that helps users feel better about their bodies and teaches them how to take care of themselves better.

Dashboard

This dashboard provides a summary of the user's daily health progress in a number of customizable categories. By providing a variety of axes by which one can quantify their health, the focus is shifted away from mere calorie counting towards a more holistic view of health

Meal Input

To avoid being overly prescriptive about eating suggestions, users are given the option of expanding the portions of a meal avoiding guilting strategies that promote negative body image. Since the app was being demoed at Princeton University, the functionality of the app centers around the campus dining halls, allowing users to choose from a menu rather than manually inputting foods.

Your Portions

After choosing the foods they want to eat, the user then receives a suggested portion size, which they can visualize, quantify and edit according to their needs. This is intended to help users understand the nutritional value of the foods they eat and consume healthy portions.

Meal Log

Here users can view the meals they have inputted and get a sense for how healthy/unhealthy it was by easily viewing the amount of protein, fats and carbs it contained. Here users can also edit their past entries.

Progress

In addition to viewing a log of past meals, users can also track their progress in terms of how well they have been meeting their goals in different categories. This allows users with different dietary goals the flexibility of visualizing their progress in different ways.

Rewards

HealthyEats also offers discounts at different local establishments with a rewards system, awarding "FitCoins" for every meal entered. While I was hesitant to jump onboard with gamifying healthy eating, I concluded that since the system was based in actual rewards that promote places offering healthy options, that it still had potential to develop long-lasting habits for users.

Onboarding

Piggybacking off the designs of onboarding on sites like Lemonade.com or Curology, I worked to make these steps feel like a conversation with a dietician, not an obtrusive questionnaire.

Onboarding

I spent a lot of time refining the user onboarding to find a balance between making it a short, non-intrusive process, and also making sure we collected enough data to make appropriate eating recommendations. This was a step where I struggled with the ethics of requesting gender/sex to make it as inclusive as possible. Unfortunately, the formulas utilized by the team were highly sexed and did not provide the flexibility to include bodies that don't fall within neat male/female categories. This was an important step for me in understanding the importance of details like this for making designs that do not promote exclusion.

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