Gamification of Veganistik
The Final Project was working on project for a real launched app. Among the five presented companies, I’ve picked the challenge proposed by Veganistik, an app to support people in their process of transitioning for a plant-based diet.
Business Analysis
The very first step of the Design Process is to examine the business needs and goals in order to identify project requirements:
Veganistik is a holistic platform that offers smart guides, community support, food recommendations and a marketplace for people who want to adopt or have adopted a sustainable plant-based lifestyle.
My goal was to provide an interactive and gamified redesigned recipe section to encourage users to cook the recipes, because 33% of people transitioning to plant-based life drops out during the process.
From that, I’ve structured my problem statement as : Enthusiastic vegans need to consistently cook varied dishes daily, because they easily run out of creativity and start considering quit their new diet.
Competitive Analysis
I’ve analyzed five concurrents of Veganisitk, and classified which assets were or not present in each one of the given apps, to better understand the market status at the moment:
Empathise: User Research
Regarding the Design Thinking process, I’ve stared my work by empathizing with potential users of the app. For doing so, I’ve first gathered some resourceful information linked to veganism, as existent products and related academic articles to the diet.
After that, I’ve conducted a quantitative research, by doing a survey; and a qualitative research, by doing user interviews. The survey had 17 questions, amongst 12 open-ended and 5 close-ended, built to understand our target audiences’ values, motivations, and daily routines, and it was answered by 60 users. For the interview, in 2 days, I’ve recruited and interviewed 5 users remotely.
Bellow there’s an affinity diagram with the main insights that I’ve had from the mentioned User Research:
Define: User Needs
An Affinity Diagram is a tool that gathers large amounts of subjective data (ideas, opinions, issues) and organizes them into groupings based on their natural links.
I’ve categorized all the gathered data based on their correlation and got six different groups, that I’ve entitled as may be seen in the image bellow, write in bold grey letters. After that, I’ve highlighted all those that I’ve considered as possible design opportunities.
Those highlighted data made me raise some conclusions about the research:
1 — People feel lost indeed in the process of preparing their meal regarding their new feeding habits;
2 — Recipes would be better sorted if by: Ingredients; Time; Rating;
3— That it is somewhat important mentioning: Nutrients and Lasting time.
Also have helped me to define some questions to solve through the “How Might We” statements:
And helped me to build a Persona, a Human-Centered tool that will remind me that I’m creating a product for a person, not for a faceless user. This Persona assembled from the behaviors and motivations of the actual users that I have actually encountered in my research.
Ideation:
Since the Design Thinking Process is iterative, I’ve considered the raised questions, as the gathered data, to run a visual competitive Analysis and better understand what worked or not in the User Interface of the concurrents.
And from the cross-over of the Competitive Analysis and the User Research, I’ve concluded that:
1 — Preparation time is a must have;
2 — A lot of pictures pollutes the UX — keep it clean;Too much text doesn’t help to retain user attention;
3 — Too much text doesn’t help to retain user attention.
Since my goal was to provide a gamification, I think that it is relevant to disclaim that it is the craft of deriving all the fun and engaging elements found in games and applying them to real-world or productive activities. This is a process of “Human-Centered Design”, the opposite of “Function-Focused Design”, as it promotes a ludic environment instead of pure efficiency, because it optimizes human motivation in a system.
From that, I’ve chosen which principles of the Gamification Octalysis (a gamification’s methodology) I’d use on the app, and how could I apply them to the current Recipe’s section of Veganistik.
Prototyping
Before starting to Prototype, I’ve sketched a User Flow of the section of the app that I would work with:
Then I’ve sketched a lo-fi prototype:
To better understand the changes that I have done, here is the current version of the recipe’s section, that consists in three different pages: the landing page, the selected recipe and, scrolling down, the cooking instructions.
In my redesign, I’ve sorted the recipes as “Challenges” and I’ve add a “Suggest a new challenge” bar to add meaning, one of the pillars of gamification. This meaning would be help raising the options of possible recipes and, therefore, adding to the community. A new recipe can also be logged at anytime (while in the recipe’s section) by hitting “+” button. Logging a new recipe would promote another pillar present on the Gamification Octalysis, the creativity: repeatedly figure things out and try different combinations.
Besides implementing the gamification changes on the User Interface, I’ve also integrated the recipe’s section with the “profile section” and the “feed section”, so it would make the User Flow more integrated — and Veganistik claims to be a holistic platform. In both sections, it will be displayed tracks of execution and accomplishment of the challenges, what would add a social influence experience of haring and competing with other users, one of the bases of gamification.
The tracks will be a:
1 - A gallery on the “profile section” on the tab “posts”, in which the picture of the executed recipe would be automatically uploaded and fixed. This image will temporarily appear in the feed, for the user’s network;
2 — A tab on the “profile section” with the accomplished badges, what would provide a sense of accomplishment: getting rewarded for a specific action that the user have executed; and ownership: accumulated wealth and time spent on the customized goals — another two amongst the chosen pillars of the Gamificadtion Octalysis.
Here it is a video of redesigned UI:
In on hand the app will already improve the company as:
- The platform will be more integrated, since the pictures of the recipes that were uploaded (as the last step of the game) will be displayed on the main feed and user’s profile;
- Following the recipe will be more intuitive and satisfying, what will help people to persist on their new diet;
- Veganistik will be the first app to launch such proposal for a recipe’s section.
In the other hand, the app still needs to integrate the “market section” to the “recipe’s section”; and needs to design more badges to reward the users. Further usability tests should run to understand what user think that could be improved.
