UX Case Study: Helping parents keep their families healthy and happy
There are so many options out there when it comes to feeding a family and it can be very difficult to find meals that the whole family loves. Many parents don’t feel confident when it comes to grocery shopping for meals that are both delicious and healthy.
Create a website that allows parents to create a custom meal plan of delicious and healthy meals based on the users cooking skill level, budget, and their families collective likes and dislikes. The site should also make shopping as simple as possible by automatically creating a weekly shopping list containing every item needed for their meals. The overall goal is to help parents promote a healthy lifestyle for their kids.
Because the overall goal was promoting a healthy lifestyle for children, research was especially important and useful in determining the best way to accomplish this. So we decided to use as many sources as possible.
For starters, we created an online survey that we distributed through social media. From the survey we determined that people care more about the quality of their meals than they do their budget.
We also went out on the streets and spoke with any family willing to give their input. A big take away from these interactions was that most parents want to cook healthy meals, but don’t often have time to put the research into finding and learning new recipes.
We also interviewed a few children as well and found that even though most kids enjoy staying active with sports and other activities, they do not really think about what type of foods they put into their bodies. From that data we determined that the website should be geared towards parents since they seemed to be more concerned with their families health.
Finally we had a phone interview with a health care specialist who was able to give us input and insight on a good direction to take the site.
Using the information we learned from our research, we created a couple of personas. One for a parent and another for a child. These were very helpful when it came to empathizing with our users.
We initially wanted to include several features meant to educate and inform parents on the subject of children’s health as well as a social media feature to connect parents united with similar dietary goals. However, we decided to cut those features from our MVP and focus solely on the family meal plan portion of the site. We also decided to use the mobile first strategy to get started.
Sketches
I personally took on the tasks of designing the Login, My Family, My Menu and Shopping List screens. My goal was to make fit all the needed features on one screen while also keeping the design as user friendly as possible.
Lo-fi Wireframing
When wire framing, my goal was to make all the needed features fit on one screen while also keeping the design as intuitive and user friendly as possible.
Hi-fi Wireframing
When moving on to Hi-fi wire framing the first challenge was deciding upon an appropriate color scheme. We decided upon green as our primary color because of it’s association with health. We played around with several secondary colors, but only finalized the color scheme after doing accessibility testing with all several different options.
We prototyped using Invision to test for consistency of both the flow and aesthetics of the website.
From here we require additional user testing and research to determine any changes needed and additional features that would help improve upon the site.
