App Design Prototype for food consumer awareness : Get the full picture of what you really buy and eat.

Just like many people every day, I constantly worry about my weight and my health. When it comes to keep a healthy weight no matter what I try, whether is diet or exercise, the moment you break your routine everything starts falling apart.

Then, many people ask how could maintaining a healthy body weight be so darn difficult? the answer I have found is…. that it isn't! One of the problems lies in the fact that we don’t really get to understand the amount of substances that are contained in the products we buy every day at the grocery store.

DISCOVERY: It is true that every product has a label giving you “all” the nutrition information and contents of a product, however in my view, the trick for selling you most of the food junk you love is “disguising” the truth behind phrases like… “per serving” or others on the product label misleading consumers into thinking that the numbers look healthy enough.

RESEARCH: After speaking to several consumers, many of them were not aware that in reality the numbers on the label need to be calculated in order to come up with the “real total amount” of ingredients and substances in a package. Others flat out never even paid attention to labels at all. So they choose to just trust the advertisement on the product picture that reads “healthy”.

Customers are discouraged to focus on how labels work and therefore consumers seldom get a truthful representation of what they take home for their families without knowing that many of the pitfalls of our diet could easily be avoided if we only knew or saw the whole picture…

So in order to help consumers fill in some of this gaps in their grosser shopping habits, I created a prototype of an application capable of providing consumers with the total calculated amount of ingredients and substances in any given grocery store product.

EARLY DESIGNS:

The following are some of my original ideas that slowly transformed into the more complete prototype.

The following is the final prototype that describes how any user could quickly snap a picture of a product on display, and receive a more complete analysis of the contents of the product and a recommendation whether this is considered healthy or unhealthy based on a recommended 2000 cal daily diet.

This designed has evolved over time to try to focus on minimal user effort and ease of navigation while at the same time highlight the most significant data that could influence the decision of whether to buy a product or not.

I would like to share with you some snapshots of the prototype and I would love to read your thoughts and see if this idea would be useful to you or your kids as a learning tool.