The Creation of All-In: An App That Is All In On Your Health
Abstract
For our creation project, our team — Michael Vereb, Yana Gritsenko, Chyna Brown, and I — wanted to create an application that emerged from a common interest we all had: health and fitness. The choice to pursue this market was made based on various statistics and studies as well as the apparent lack in the market of an application like this. All-In is a proactive, health-based, meal planning application that brings convenience, ease, and peace of mind to its users. To create this project, our team used technological tools such as Adobe XD, Free Stock Search, Free Logo Design, and Canva. This report is meant to provide insight on how we came to create our project with valuable step-by-step processes allowing for recreation of what we made.
Overview: All-In
All-In is here to provide convenience and opportunity for health-conscious and active individuals to explore meal options and curate custom grocery lists. We aim to be the most convenient meal plan application and want our customers to know we are focused on optimizing the time they invest into planning their meals.
We are looking to tackle the problem of standardized food management applications that do not promote healthy eating habits. The fitness industry is littered with applications that count food calories, fats, sodium levels, and more once you input the meals you are eating. This, however, puts an unhealthy strain on the user. Current applications on the market that track your health and eating habits do so re-actively instead of proactively.
Currently, there is no application or product on the market that personalizes suggestions for healthy foods to purchase that fall in line with your fitness and health goals. This leaves users empty-handed, buying take-out, or eating unhealthy “easy” to cook meals. Our application, All-In, wants to solve our users problems by being proactive when it comes to curating healthy meals, allowing for convenience and ease, and ensuring that our users health goals are genuinely being met.
The All-In application is meant to have multiple functionalities. Our team wanted to create an application that checks all of our users’ boxes without requiring constant attention. The functionalities of All-In include having the ability to:
- Input your desired daily caloric and macro-nutrient target
- Input any dietary restrictions, allergies, and/or preferences
- Select your preferred sources of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats
- Select specific produced foods such as protein bars, pre-made meals, or drinks
- Input the number of days you require meals for and purchase those ingredients on your own schedule
- Manually select food group alternatives or allow the application to randomly select foods based on your preferences
- Review your suggested meals and recommended grocery list and make manual adjustments as necessary
- Select a store for pick-up or delivery based on your preferences
With these functionalities, there is great convenience in using All-In. Our application calculates the total amount of each ingredient needed to create the recommended meals. Not only do these meals fall under the dietary needs of the user, the user no longer has to worry about adding the correct proportions of ingredients or having ingredients go bad while sitting around in their fridge.
Creation Process:
In the process of creating All-In, our team had to look at two major areas: function and aesthetic. We wanted our application to have the required functions for it to run smoothly and be easy to interact with. We also wanted to ensure that the application, logo design, and business proposal presentation were all aesthetically pleasing. To create this wholesome look, we used tools from the Entrepreneur Tool page created by Dr. Mohammed Keyhani on Zeef (https://entrepreneur-tools.zeef.com/keyhanimo). We used the following tools to help create our finished product: Adobe Color, Adobe XD, Canva, and Free Logo Design.
When creating the prototype for All-In, we wanted to ensure we had something that showed the functionality of the application (See Appendix A). For this purpose, we used Adobe XD. This tool is meant to be used to create website designs, mobile apps, voice interfaces, games, and more (Adobe, 2020). Adobe XD allowed for us to create a functioning mock-up of our application. This tool also allows for a one-screen-only view as well as a wholesome view of your application pages as shown below:
We also wanted to add in a step-by-step process on how to create a screen for your prototype/mock-up.
1. To create a screen, first you must choose the size of the device you would like to see the mock-up for. For All-In, we chose an iPhone X/XS.
2. Select the background for that screen by using the options on the left hand side and add the main text/message for that screen. This is also where we chose the font. For our application we used the font “Marker Felt”. It is important to remember which font your use in the case that you would like to use the same font in the logo design (which we did).
3. To add a button, you select the rectangle shape and overlay text on top.
4. To make the button functional, go to ‘Prototype’ and link to the screen that you want the button to lead to.
5. If your screen requires a scroll down menu, all you need to do is stretch out the background past the bottom borderline. Everything past the bottom border can be viewed by scrolling down in the preview mode of the mock-up.
Our team also used Plug-in functions and chose Free Stock Search for XD to add images and visuals. This helped us to create a synonymous and aesthetically pleasing look across the application. Free Stock Search is a free application and can be downloaded onto your device and allows for the stock photos to be downloaded directly into your Adobe applications (Free Stock Search, 2020). Free Stock Search searches free stock photo platforms such as unsplash.com, pixabay.com, and pexels.com. It also provides options from Adobe Stock and Shutterstock that you may purchase. Our team chose to use free photos and this app worked very well with Adobe XD.
When creating an application prototype, there are various options on the market. This includes, but is not limited to, Wix, Pixate, and Flinto (Keyhani, 2020). There are various other options that can be found on Dr. Keyhani’s Zeef page.
When it came to the logo creation process for All-In, we first had a meeting as a team to decide our desired colour palette. We wanted the application logo to be bright, yet chic. Our team chose colours that were not typical for a fitness or meal planning application; these types of applications normally use various tones of yellow and green. We also did not want our logo to be too minimalistic, because we still wanted it to stand on its own and let people gauge from the design what our business is. Taking note from Kris Hans’ discussion in class when discussing the new logo design from BMW, we wanted our logo to have dimension, and we did not want it to sit flat and lifeless. A very helpful tip for those creating a tool like this is to create a colour palette with the colour codes so all aspects of your design have a cohesive look. In deciding the colours we wanted to use, we looked at palettes on Adobe Color. This website gave us a lot of inspiration in terms of what is popular, which colours work well together, and what kind of overall theme we wanted to create with our application. Adobe Color’s main functionality is that it allows from users to create a colour theme and save it to their free account (Adobe, 2020). Once we decided which colours we would like to use, we created our palette using Adobe Color.
To create the logo for All-In, we used a tool called Free Logo Design (freelogodesign.org). Although this is not one of the tools recommended by in his Zeef post, we chose this one because it allowed for a lot of free-range and complete control over the design. We followed the steps outlined on the website to create our logo.
1. On Free Logo Design, you start by choosing a name and a category for your business. Under “categories” it provides users with many options including but not limited to: agriculture, consulting, fashion & beauty, and more. This is meant to provide users with options that are more in-line with the field they are working in.
2. You may choose a template out of the many that Free Logo Design offers inside the editor, or you can create your own logo from scratch.
3. When it comes to customizing the logo, Free Logo Design allows users to change the colour, shape, font, icons, and more by using the toggle bar on the left-hand side of the screen. For our logo, this is where we changed the logo colours to follow the colour palette we had previously decided on as a team.
4. Choosing the font: To ensure that the look of our logo was synchronized with our application, we wanted to ensure the font was as close as possible, if not the exact same, to the font we used in the application design. Free Logo Design did not have the font “Marker Felt”, but it did have the font “Mogra” which looks the exact same.
5. Free Logo Design allows for you to download your logo for free. The website provides a user with an unlimited amount of downloads; this is optimal when you are still work-shopping the logo and trying to gauge interest from your team. However, if you would like to have a high resolution version of the logo, you may also purchase it as well.
From our experience with Free Logo Design, it is user-friendly and easy to use. There are many other online tools you can use with similar functionalities such as Canva, or Wix which have very similar functionalities to Free Logo Design. If you already have a logo design in mine, we would also recommend a tool such as Adobe Illustrator, as this tool allows for a lot more creative freedom.
Lastly, we wanted out presentation to also be aesthetically pleasing and easy to follow. To create our presentation we used Canva. Since Canva allows for its users to try a 30 day free trial of Canva Pro, we decided to utilize this option. Canva allows for the use of their templates which users can then go in and edit. The process of creating our presentation was fairly simple:
1. Select the template you would like to use
2. Re-format the slides based on your preferences. Canva has the functionality of easy-snapping, which allows users to format their slides easily and ensure their presentation is as symmetric or as asymmetric as they like.
Similarly to the other tools we used, there are many alternative tools you can use to create a presentation for a business model and prototype. From Dr. Keyhani’s Zeef page, we recommend Prezi due to its user-friendliness and interactivity. You can also use Microsoft PowerPoint; however, it does not have some of the more creative functions that Canva and Prezi have.
Conclusion:
In creating this application, our team learned a lot about the process of building something from nothing. A key takeaway for each of us was the vast amount of technological tools which are readily available to entrepreneurs whether they are in the beginning stages of their business, or more mature. By going through Dr. Keyhani’s Zeef page, we were able to see which tools did or did not work for us. Using the tools we did — Adobe Color, Adobe XD, Canva, and Free Logo Design— made creating our application a smooth process.
References
Adobe Color. (2020). Trends: Discover current color trends in different industries from the creative communities on Behance and Adobe Stock. Retrieved from https://color.adobe.com/trends.
Adobe XD. (2020). XD features. Retrieved from https://www.adobe.com/ca/products/xd.html
Free Stock Search. (2020). Retrieved from https://exchange.adobe.com/creativecloud.details.100727.free-stock-search.html
Hello Fresh. (2020). Order your delicious food box: Healthy meals. Retrieved from https://www.hellofresh.ca/plans/
Keyhani, M. (2020). Entrepreneur tools. Retrieved from https://entrepreneur-tools.zeef.com/keyhanimo
Kunst, A. (2019, December 20). Usage of e-health apps to track nutrition among U.S. adults 2017. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/698892/us-adults-that-would-use-an-app-to-track-their-diet/
Leonhardt, M. (2017, July 20). These 2 Charts Show Just How Popular Meal-Kit Services Are. Retrieved from https://money.com/who-buys-meal-kit-services/
