Case study: Healthy Zone Application
MY FIRST STEP
I had my Computer Science degree 2 months ago. Finally, I’m free!
This temporary feeling of happiness soon disappeared. Day after day, I’ve been questioning myself what my next step will be? What do I like to be?
UNIVERSITY DAYS
When I was a student, I studied many courses for various topics in computer science, one hard and one easy. Until I reached my final year, I wasn’t sure what I liked yet about my major. At the beginning of the first semester, I had to choose between elective courses, and I was skimming over the available courses till I found a course called “Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)”, which was the main reason to be at this course now! I found my passion.
MISK’s UX BOOTCAMP
I remember how happy and lucky I was when I got an email informing me of the acceptance :D
Hello students, we want to welcome you on your first day of the course. How can we say it? Actually… you’re going to have your first project starting from today!
— Our Instructor
Oops, what a start! (T_T)
CASE STUDY
BRIEF
Team: Badiah Almutairi, Nojoom Alaqeel
Project Duration: 5 days
Goal: To create a new user experience by designing a solution to meet users’ needs.
INTRODUCTION
As humans, our brain is always on. It takes care of our thoughts and movements, our breathing and heartbeat, and our senses. It literally works hard every second, even while we are asleep.
This means that our brain requires a constant supply of fuel, and that fuel comes from the foods we eat, and what’s in that fuel makes all the difference. Simply, what we eat directly affects the structure and function of our brain and, ultimately, our mood.
Like an expensive car, our brain functions best when it gets only premium fuel. Eating high-quality foods that contain lots of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants nourishes the brain and protect it from oxidative stress — the “waste” produced when the body uses oxygen, which can damage cells, and vice versa.
EMPATHIZE 💖
In this phase, our main goal is to deep dive and search for information about college students to learn their behaviors and pain points in terms of healthy eating.
We found a study that revealed to us that it’s common for a variety of college students to have an eating disorder in one phase of their life. From this point, we started to think about:
WHAT MIGHT LEAD THEM TO DISORDERED EATING?
To answer this question, we interviewed 6 students and asked them these questions:
- Describe your eating habits in a day as a college student?
- What changes happened in your eating habits since you started college?
- Did you consider having a healthy lifestyle before? if not why?
- What different eating behaviors do you have between eating on campus and at home?
- Why do you think most college students tend to eat unhealthy food?
- What affects your appetite during the day?
LET’s SYNTHESIZE
Using affinity mapping, we have been able to categorize the user’s answers based on 6 categories, and we got these findings:
- Most college students eat unhealthy food.
- Most of them agreed on the limited healthy options inside the campus.
- Their peers affect their food choices.
- They thought that healthy food is expensive and it isn’t filling their stomach enough.
- Time, pressure, and a busy schedule are common important factors that led to eating unhealthy.
DEFINE 👓
After we deep-dived and empathized with college students’ pain points, we are able now to define what is the problem that they have.
THE PROBLEM IS …
College students who are used to have a healthy eating lifestyle are now struggling to maintain their healthy eating habits while focusing on their study. They need a solution allows to them to manage between their study and healthy eating.
WHAT MAY BE THE SOLUTION?
Our solution for them is an app that covers the majority of their needs for healthy food options to help students maintain their lifestyle while studying, containing features that let them find and choose their needs fastly and easily.
HOW DO COLLEGE STUDENTS MEET OUR SOLUTION?
One of the college students has a problem with her eating habits and she needs a solution for it, Let’s discover how does her problem meets our solution in this short story.
IDEATE 💭
After we defined the problem, we started to think about the solution and the features that our targeted user’s college students need. We discussed many features, but in the end, we decided to apply these features:
- Order Healthy Food
- Schedule the order
- Prepare healthy recipes
- Set a reminder for healthy recipes
DESIGN 🎨
Design is like a blue genie; it makes the dream come true. In our situation, we will make the features that we thought about in the ideation phase become a real design to interact with.
HOW DO STUDENTS REACH THOSE FEATURES?
If you asked yourself this question, this part will answer it. Using this flow, we demonstrated how college students with eating habits issues will achieve their goals.
INITIAL SKETCHES FOR THE FLOW
FINAL DESIGN
CLICKABLE DESIGN 📱
TESTING 🖊
As we all know, nothing is perfect in this life, everything needs enhancements, and this is the main goal of this phase.
We let college students tried our design to see how they interact with it, and define the problems that they face to make enhancements on them, and that is what we got:
FIRST PROBLEM
Students were confused by setting a reminder without having any feedback.
SOLUTION
We added a success message after setting a reminder.
SECOND PROBLEM
Students didn’t know where to view their reminders after they set one.
SOLUTION
We created a reminder page containing a list of reminders.
WHAT I LEARNED
One of the best lessons that I have learned in this project is that good communication between the team will give you better results, no matter what their personality look like, everyone has the right to speak up their ideas loudly, others listening to them, then discuss about these ideas with respect.
This project gave me the basic skills of UX design in terms of how to search about a problem, understand it, and design a suitable solution to it.
