Shuga: An app to help people to track their sugar intake
By Fabiana Jadraque
Summary
This project is about making an app for people of all ages to track their sugar intake, research, interviews, and surveys were made to collect the data necessary to develop this app. It took a week to get done and This case study focuses on the written report assignment part of the project.
The research
I conducted 41 preliminary interviews were I asked people “What’s the #1 habit in your life that you would like to change?”, and I got very random answers, for example, emotional overeating, quit smoking, being more organized, biting my nails, too much time on social media, love myself, read more, patience, money, procrastinate, etc. But the ones that I got the most were doing more exercise (12% of the interviewed), waking up early or staying up late (12% of the interviewed) and alimentation habits, such as emotional overeating, skipping meals, eating too much to the point I can’t move, eating way too many sugars, or not eating at all (35% of the interviewed).
At this moment I realized that the majority of people are concerned about what they eat, and also that they would like to change that habit that concerns them. So I conducted a survey en which I got 156 answers, in there I focused on eating habits, asking if people found eating healthy important if they considered they have a healthy diet, how many times they ate too much or did not ate on the past week, how many times last week they ate sugar, and more.
In the survey, I got amazing insights and I got to find out more about how people perceive their eating habits.
Some important data that I collected is that 97% of the people that answered the survey find that it is important to eat balanced, 95% of the people would like to improve their daily diet, 49% ate food with added sugars more than 2 times last week and finally 72% of the people that answered the survey would like to reduce their sugar intake.
After getting the conclusions of the survey I realized I needed to go in-depth in the sugar intake theme since a lot of people seemed to worry about it in the answers of the survey, so I conducted interviews via Zoom with 11 people.
In this interview I focused on the sugar intake and asked the interviewee about it, why would they like to reduce their sugar intake? Did they know nowadays most of the foods we eat have added sugars? Would they track their sugar intake? How would they track it? If they had an app, what features would they like? And so… These interviews gave me amazing insights and actually a lot of people are very conscious about what they eat and they even tend to check the labels when they go to the supermarket and a few of them have food tracking apps. Some important findings that I would like to highlight are that 8 out of 11 interviewees would like to reduce their sugar intake for their own health and well being, 2 out of 11 interviewees would like to reduce their sugar intake because of the physical appearance, 5 out of 11 are scared of diabetes and 6 out of 11 buy sugar-free products when there’s the possibility.
The Problem
The core problem in this project is that people want to track, control, and reduce their sugar intake because they are worried about their health and well-being. Research showed that nowadays people are concerned about their health and how is that going to affect them in the future so I hoped to address this question: How might I design a simple and straight forward tool, in this case, an app, to help people track their daily sugar intake.
The Solution
I created an app called Shuga, this way users can track their daily sugar intake, in which they can add their foods divided by breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Thus they can classify their sugar intake by meal. They introduce their data (age, gender, weight, and height) so the app can calculate their daily sugar intake, this way they get a scope of what they are tracking. When tracking each food they get the number of grams of sugar it has, and how that adds up to their sugar limit (by grams and percentage). They will get a home screen where they can see the day they are in and how much sugar have they consumed on that specific day. So at the end of the day, they can see how much sugar have they consumed in total and if they have consumed more than the recommended dose.
The tools
Google Forms to convey the survey, Mural to make affinity diagrams and data conclusions, markers, and pencil to make lo-fi paper prototypes, Figma for prototyping, and conducting user testing.
Meet Estefania!
- 24 years old
- She’s from Maracaibo, Venezuela but now lives in Barcelona
- Wants to reduce her sugar intake
- Hobbies: tennis, fashion design
- She enjoys going to the beach and meeting with friends
- She would like to track what she’s eating
- Used to work at Nike, so she’s pretty inspired by them
- If there’s the possibility she will buy sugar-free products
- “A peach does not have the same amount of sugar as an oreo, but both still have”
- Now works at Camp Nou in the Barça Store
- She is very organized
- Pays attention to what she’s eating since she wants to be healthier
- Thinks that food tracking apps are complicated and not straight forward enough
The Scenario
Estefania downloaded Shuga because co-workers recommended it because now she is on a diet and since she is very organized they pointed the app would work for her.
SHUGA!
Estefania downloads Shuga because a coworker recommended it, it’s the first time she opens it and she’s going to do the setup and then introduce what she's having for breakfast.
Check out the prototype:
The Iterations
- Welcome screen: a better copy of the daily intake because users didn’t understand it, improvement of the daily limit toggle button, and swap of the buttons because users said that they are used to having the okay button at the right of the screen.
2. Brands: Added more brands so the screen would be scrollable since users said that there are way too many brands of every single food.
Added little titles to the navigation bar and “search” because users told me that they would like to check out the nutritional facts of foods before eating them.
3. One food: In the screen of every food, the “serving size” wasn't clear to the users so I added a plus and minus button, also changed the “add more” button to “add more food” because users didn't understand if it was adding more servings or add more food.
4. Meal screen: Added the “okay” button to the meal screen since users felt that it was necessary.
I made 3 versions of Lo-Fi prototypes and tested them with 10 users and then a final Mid-Fi version which I tested 4 times.
Next Steps
- Finish all the possible screens the app has since I didn't get to show how to search for food by scanning barcodes.
- Add recommendations to switch food for healthier options (Ex: I scan an Oreo and get recommendations of similar cookies but with lower sugar levels) since a few of the interviewees told me that they would like to have that feature.
- To have a section of foods organized by category (from sugar-free to sugar high) so users can discover new things.
- Make a reminder when user surpasses their sugar intake.
- Users would like to also track fats, vitamins, water, carbs, etc.
Key Learnings
- I learned about the importance of doing a lot of interviews since every head is a world and people have a lot of interesting things to say and that things become nice insights.
- It is really important to do a lot of usability testings with all of the iterations because it’s interesting to see how every single person has different ideas and points of view.
- Be organized when working alone, make schedules, goals, and plan everything in advance.