Tough Love: a sugarfree love story.
note of the author: I like to comment my own writing, so whenever you read something in italic (and within brackets) it’s just my inner self taking over.
I met Carl when we were working together at the same company couple of years ago. He recently became father and I truly believe he’ll be a cool dad, mostly because he never really evolved to the adult stage, which makes him the most suitable of playmates. On the other hand, being a cool parent doesn’t mean you’re one of the good ones. Coming from a person that can kill a baby cactus, what you need is the fundamental ability of taking care of another human being. It’s not that Carl doesn’t have it, but there is definitely some space for improvement.
Like his grocery shopping habits: that cutiepie of Carl loves to bring some treats back home, because we all like to be liked and there’s no better way to do that than buying love (what a materialistic society we are, shame shame shame). But he tries hard to be healthy and stay away from refined sugar products. Or that’s what he thinks he’s doing (ah you poor disillusioned thing!). As a matter of fact, Carl goes grocery right after work, hungry like hell, and to hurry up he throws stuff in the cart without really filtering anything.
I can hear his Swedish brain saying something utterly incomprehensible, which translated sounds like “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 as research showed, 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.
Here’s where UX Design magic comes in to save the day (Actually it came in at the very beginning of this article, but if you understood Carl’s analogy, my empathising skills actually work). My reason to save people from sugar should be clear at this point (by that I mean clearly egoistical, because I’m one of the poor addicted souls who needs to be saved) but I might have to explain why my target group is related to Carl. Sugar addiction is a serious issue, which can lead to a lot of health-related troubles later on (diabetes, anybody?) and if any of you has heard of Jamie Oliver, you already know how dangerous this is for children and how important is to address them first. That I thought until my brain, in its last spur of mental agility, pointed out “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 (duhh). 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.
My research on Carl (in case you didn’t get it, Carl is my user persona) revealed this 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.)
So now the question was: How do I make them aware? And why don’t they read nutritional facts?
After intense minutes of brainstorming with my design team (“yo brain” “yo girl!” “it’s me and you again?” “So it seems girl, so it seems”) my solution was to translate these meaningless 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.
BUT of course testing showed some issues, like the fact that the user never even click on the profile page, because it basically is purpose-less (then why the heck did I even design it?!! ). 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” 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 debatable 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 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
Next step was to simply translate the mid-fi into hi-fi, but considering I’m a smarty-pants and ended up accidentally deleting my sketch file (ah double the work, love it), my final project looked a bit different from what I originally planned.
Since we all know how hard it is to quit an addiction, I decided that my brand should have been a tough one, a brand that doesn’t lie about how hard the journey it is and it won’t sugarcoat anything, not even the words (get it? get it?). That’s how Tough Love was born.
I wanted my brand to be
…modern and young because it has a clean design and wants to keep up with latest design trends, since it’s addressing a young target (30 year old, young parents).
…tough and straightforward because our main goal is to make people understand how much sugar can become addictive. It’s a sensitive topic but people need to know the truth, even if it’s harsh.
…sensitive and supportive because even though people have to learn the hard way, as a brand we’re perfectly aware that everybody is going through a lot everyday, so we’re honest and straightforward but always with a pinch of sugar (that’s allowed) in our tone of voice. We always want our users to feel understood every step of the way.
…funny and friendly because we want to push our users into a positive mindset (you need one if you want to quit any kind of addiction), they need to be supported as if we’re their BFF.
On these premises I built my moodboard first, my style tile and my design system then.
As for the evolution of the design, you can see down here the old one how it changed from the mid-fi to the hi-fi.
My main problem was how to define a visual that could help the user to immediately understand that a product is dangerous for them (the app also gives the user the option to change the visual in plain numbers and more detailed nutritional facts if needed). Eventually I opted for an animated illustration of a kid (since it’s addressing parents again) that gets all jittery when the sugar amount is too high. After I finalised all my screens, I met Flinto (I wish it was the name of a dog, but hell no it’s the most awesome and hateful animation program ever created) and below it’s the final main user flow to scan the product and get feedbacks about the sugar quantity.
Pretty cool huh?
As for my next steps, it would be cool to actually have a real diet plan, that would finally make you quit on sugar (the current version allows you to read and get informed about potential methods, but since I’m not a nutritionist I don’t want to get any responsibility for building a wrong diet plan), and the option to share you results and maybe even build a community around to give you the proper support and motivation (right now only push-up notifications are available). And then unicorns, unicorns, unicorns.
I’ll keep you posted if something cool happens for this little creature of mine. Now let’s go eat donuts.
