CrowdCal and my Coursera Experience
I had no idea this UX Coursera course would conclude with me actually designing a fully functional prototype when I began almost a year ago. When I first read that assignment felt a little overwhelmed but after we applied methods we learned week after week it started feeling more attainable and almost natural.
We were tasked with developing two solutions for a problem. The problem I was trying to help people solve was how to change their diet and eat better. Originally it was slanted to fit my vegan agenda, but it ended up being more than that.
At first I was a little exasperated. Haven’t all of the food/calorie tracking apps been invented already!? This is stupid, I thought. But when I conducted some interviews with people about the trouble they have changing food habits I actually come up with two ideas that i had never seen or heard of before. The first problem which resonated with me is people being too afraid to try new recipes or diets because they are bad cooks, when they cook something and it’s bad they don’t know if it’s because they made it bad, or they don’t like it. People are sometimes too afraid to try something new because of a bad experience they had.
What if there was a way for you to see a recipe and try eating it before you try making it? Or, once you made it and it wasn’t that good, you could try it professionally made? That is where the concept for FoodTrials came from. This app idea would let users look up recipes and learn how to cook new foods, but in addition to ingredients and instructions this app would show you food establishments in your area where that dish is served. Before going to the store and investing in all the ingredients needed to make lentil falafel you could stop by a local restaurant to try it first. Restaurants would who want to show up in these results would need to make bids similarly to how Adwords works.
The second problem I identified from my interview was people having trouble maintaining the habit of logging their calories in an app. Logging calories and tracking meals has been proven to help people make dietary changes, but it’s often time consuming to input food, especially if it’s something new or uncommon. Once a meal or two are skipped it’s easy too all out of the habit. The solution is CrowdCal, this app lets you enter a photo of your feed and other people will log it for you so you don’t need to take any time with it at all!
In the end I made the decision to create a prototype for CrowdCal (originally InstaCal) as it seemed like the most viable app and after putting some more thought into it I even found a very intuitive way for the app to make money and encourage engagement. The app would be open to sponsorships from restaurants and when someone would log your food for you the app would categorize the food: Pizza, dessert, lunch, avocado etc… The person who entered your food would gain in-app credits which can be redeemed for coupons, and when the users logged back in to see their food rated the app would declare that the rating is sponsored by Pizza hut or Dairy Queen. Companies would be able to target specific audiences, and users would earn coupon they could redeem to eat their favorite foods. It’s a win win!
Throughout the development process I ran into lots of issues with how to name the various actions in my application. Once a user uploads a photo of food they can choose to either log in themselves, or have someone log it for them. This terminology isn’t very intuitive and I went through multiple variations of what to name these buttons until I finally A/B tested two final variations with UserTesting.
I was surprised by how large my app had to be. In my original paper prototype I only had about 10 screens in my mind. The paper prototype only showed 4 of them. But the final prototype in Axure ended up being over 20 screen with many not even shown. I got down into he weeds in profile and settings but even before that it was surprising how many screens are needed to create this seemingly simple experience.
One of the most eye opening experiences for me was when strangers from UserTesting were looking at my prototype. They had a super hard time understanding why things behaved the way they did even though the introduction explained it to them. For example any fields would auto populate in my prototype after a user clicked in the field. Every user found this confusing, but I can’t think of any other way to make a prototype! They also often failed to understand the next step in the process, which I understand is often my fault, but I wish I could just prompt them for the sake of the experiment and I could not. The lesson I learned is never show people a prototype unless you are physically there to help them navigate it.
I found this experience very rewarding and I think my idea for CrowdCal is actually very good and this app the potential to be very successful. Perhaps I will take some more Coursera courses on mobile development and actually get this made. Meanwhile, check out this quick app demo: https://youtu.be/-DbK2E36W3A