NOMnom

Task:
Design a persuasive artifact to persuade people about an issue you care about — Nomnom! targets an existing gap in the digital solutions to food-tracking. By leveraging gamification and rewards-based methods of tracking and incentivizing progress, we reframe picky-eating as a collaborative opportunity for learning and growth for parents and children.

Collaborators: Anna Chuenrudeemol, Dion Lewis

Role: Designer (UI Design, UX Research, Brand Design, App Prototyping)

Problem Space

Picky Eating
How might we persuade people to try out new foods and eat foods they don’t like?

The topic we elected to pursue is persuading children to try new and unfamiliar foods, especially in the case of ingredients they don’t think they like. We felt like food is a fairly universal space to practice persuasion, especially in the case of picky-eaters, moreover working with a younger audience in mind raises the stakes and is more personally compelling given the importance of establishing healthy food-based habits early in life. To combat this issue, we would like to embrace a non-confrontational method to encourage trying new foods, rather than forcing foods on them. By “gamifying” food and incentivizing children to play with their meals rather than forcing them to consume things, children will be able to have an emotional connection by gaining positive memories about the food.

Research

From these findings, we were able to ideate ideas for effective solutions that addressed a current gap in the market:
- Similar to a Pokédex, creating a system to organize and track foods that offers a gamified motivation
- Recommend similar foods/branches
- Educational tool about nutrition
- Parent + Kid modeling
- Give children control over their food journey
- Eliminating the notion of parents “fixing” their children, reframe to be collaborative problem-solving
- Instead of food-based rewards, offer interfaced-based rewards

Design Solution (Wireframes)

Final Features

Final App

Click here to access the app virtually in Figma, video link here

Concluding Thoughts

This project was a quick sprint done for the class “Design Studies: Persuasion”. As the goal was to create a persuasive artifact to persuade people about an issue you care about, this project was mostly research-intensive given the constraints of the duration and goals of the class. The research that we performed guided our design choices and direction, as we aimed to fill the gap that is currently present in existing similar apps. If an opportunity to continue this project arose, I would like to conduct user testing on actual parents to address further issues and better meet the needs of the target users.