Illustrator was my first graphic love. Then I met Sketch.
When I started at Ironhack three weeks ago I thought “hey, I got this, it’s not too much.” Then third week came and with it our first solo project. And hell began.
Nah just kidding I really like being overdramatic (these Italians all drama queens!), but now that is Saturday and I slept 10 hours straight I can recollect my thoughts and tell you about my first design sprint. Our brief was to design a digital wellness tool (ideally an App) that could help people live a healthier life. And since we touched a sensitive topic I decided to deal with one of my biggest weaknesses, meaning sugar addiction. (hello sugar, we met again).
My process started with the empathising face, through research and interviews. And shoutout to me that after 26 years of being the slowpoke and not learning from my procrastination mistakes, I finally got it (for now) and started my research on Sunday. But apparently people are not fine with me stalking them on social media, so I relied mostly on my buddy Google, which made my start with some assumptions and hypothesis. At 9pm, when my brain went on its laziness strike, I bumped in old chap Jamie Oliver, one of the most influential figures in nutrition field — fighting against child obesity and sugar addiction — and I thought: AH! I found my target group! That was until my brain, in its last spur of mental agility, said “Oh please, when you were a kid you barely knew how to tie your shoelaces.” Fair point. This lead to a slight adjustment: who’s the closest person to a child who could influence their eating behaviour? Well, their parents (duh.) Most specifically I decided to interview young parents because they have younger children, meaning higher chances to change the little brats’ habits.
So that was my starting point on Monday, interviewing parents and questioning their relationship with sugar. From South Africa to Sweden, my research lead to parents like Carl.
My user persona revealed the following crucial point
Parents want to avoid processed food, but they don’t like to read nutritional facts. They tend to avoid sweets, but are also unaware that sugar hides everywhere (in bread, yogurt, juice, to mention some.)
To narrow it down, my problem hypothesis was this: if I can make the parents AWARE that sugar is dangerous for them and hides in high quantity in almost every item, maybe they’ll start cutting it and open the healthy path for their kids too. But how do I make them aware? And why don’t they read nutritional facts?
Carl’s journey highlighted definitely a problem with snacking. He doesn’t have a proper amount of healthy and balanced meals, which results in high peak on insulin and frequent cravings. Not to mention his brain is positive that he’s not really on a sugar roll (pff, you poor disillusioned thing). My main pain point occurred when Carl went to the supermarket. As a matter of fact, Carl is hungry and to hurry up he throws stuff in the cart without really filterning anything. He thinks “yeah if stay away from sweets I’m already riding the healthy slide.” WRONG CARL, THAT’S JUST WRONG! But I get it, I don’t blame Carl, I blame math. Why? because nutritional facts are just a bunch of numbers that are meaningless to my eyes, considering I have no idea if 25 grams of a total of 250 grams per product is too much or too little (there’s a reason why I picked a creative job instead of engineering). And I feel also Carl and many others run in the same kind of issue. They rely on “experience” and assumptions, but ignoring numbers and facts is not the answer. So my solution was to translate these useless numbers into some kind of visual that could be relatable. Of course the visual (a scale? A diagram? A jumping monkey? The design team is still working on it) is based on data and the most important information of all, which is the daily amount of sugar should stay between 25 and 35 grams.
With this in mind I started my low fi prototype, which after testing resulted into a lot of flaws, from the site map (which highlighted a lot of useless content that the user doesn’t even care about) to the user flow (where the heck is the Home page button?!!). After hours of back and forth this was the result
All good in the hood until one the amazing Ironhack TA’s came to me with tons of questions and I had to review the content of some pages once more. Eh, the hard life of a ux designer, it’s a never-ending process.
ITERATE ITERATE ITERATE!
After taking some life changing decisions (like pff, I don’t know, adding a home page icon to it) I jumped into my mid-fi prototype. Now, I have the tendency of being picky and way too precise, my eye starts twitching at any bad font choice or crazy alignment. So my mid-fi is going way too much towards hi-fi, but hey less work for UI later on.
And since I have high demanding teachers at Ironhack, I made each and every icon and button CLICKABLE (yep, even the logo brings you to the home page now). Also, since my past as copywriter keeps bugging me wherever I go, I decided to give it a tone and tailored it specifically for young parents (tone of voice: funny, young, empathic, makes the parents know that we’re aware of their struggle) so if you have 5 mins read the copy because it’s kinda hilarious.
And for the best part, hello InVision, you hysterical fella.
https://vimeo.com/user70941543/review/297472989/e91a68db8f
For the complete article about this check my “tough love” article :)
