Overview/Background:

As part of a 10-week Design course at UC San Diego, I worked on a team of five to develop a mobile information system that would promote healthy living during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our application, FRESH, focused on bringing the nutritional and physical fitness aspects of healthy living to consumers who are struggling to track and maintain their physical health due the Stay-At-Home mandate.

Routine healthy eating and exercise should always be a priority; however, these goals can be rather difficult because authorities have implemented social distancing to slow the spread of the virus. This means that a large amount of grocery stores have altered their regular store hours and major gym chains have suspended operations, both to aid in flattening the curve. To combat these issues, we aim to launch campaigns offering nutrition and fitness guidance to help consumers maintain a healthy lifestyle.

The Problem:

Nutrition and physical fitness are difficult aspects of life to manage even under normal circumstances. The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures put in place to combat its spread only serve to increase the difficulty of maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

User Research:

The first step of our developmental process was to conduct a questionnaire to find out about how people are handling life under the circumstances of the pandemic. We wanted to get responses from as many different types of people as possible so we posted our questionnaire online through social media and online discussion forums. We asked questions that targeted nutritional and physical health before and after the stay at home order was announced such as:

• How do you feel about your nutritional health prior to/after the shelter in place order?
• How often do you cook at home prior to/after the shelter in place order?
• How many times do you perform physical exercise in a week prior to/after the shelter in place order?
• What workout activities, if any, did you regularly participate in before/after the shelter in place order?

Analyzing our results, we found out that 44% of people expressed dissatisfaction regarding their physical health following the stay at home order. This is a huge decrease in satisfaction compared to how they felt about their health before the quarantine. This is mainly due to layoffs and institutions of learning switching to a remote system, leading to an overall increase of downtime. At the same time measures are put in place to slow the spread of the disease, and the downtime is consequently wasted. The takeaway here is that:

User Personas:

We created the following user personas because we believed they would represent the greatest primary stakeholders on our platform.

The first would be students living on campus, who have need to monitor their nutrition and physical health, but are limited by their environment. This may be due to lack of open gyms as well as the lack of healthy dining options at school or limited grocery options in the markets. Furthermore, many students also lack transportation to a grocery store.

The second stakeholder would generally be people who live at home. They would have similar needs as students but with slightly different limitations such as space, family environment, and access to delivered food through apps such as Uber Eats.

Our third primary stakeholder would be the personal trainers and nutritionists who are looking for clients to serve to make a living, because due to the quarantine, they cannot continue working.

Upon later speculation, we decided that the primary stakeholders who were students living on campus and the general population who live at home and require health monitoring can just occupy one persona, due to the similarity of needs and limitations.

Competitive Audit:

We realized that our app would be competing with three main types of existing solutions. The first would be manual logging of nutrition and physical fitness progress through a spreadsheet type of application such as Google Sheets. However, this is not user friendly and essentially acts as an organizer for information rather than an information provider.

The next are nutrition applications that customize diets and meals according to the users’ dietary preferences and health goals. The final are fitness applications that provide multi-week exercise programs that would help the user perform workouts to meet a certain physical fitness goal. The drawback on both of these apps are that they cost a large amount of money a year for a subscription and are mutually exclusive from each other.

Storyboards:

Storyboards help us direct a narrative to how the app will solve the overarching problem statement. Our first question is “How might we help people keep their nutrition on track given the limited grocery availability in on campus markets?” This issue is based on the problem that users may be malnourished due to their environment. Our second question is “How might we help people meet their fitness goals in constrained spaces with limited resources?” This issue is based on the problem that arose due to the quarantine orders, people have more time to themselves but do not have the resources to work on their physical fitness.

Low Fidelity Prototypes:

We wanted our app to have five core functions to meet five core needs. The needs we wanted to address are nutritional guidance, health tracking, recipe ideas, exercise inspiration, meal inspiration, and professional consultation for premium members.

This is a mockup of how we intend to display nutritional information for recipes. We want the user to have full transparency of what they are consuming. For our health monitor, we wanted the user to have calculated goals, and provide them tracking tools to record their progress.

Our ideas for professional consultation would allow the user to video call or set up virtual appointments with their chosen health professional. Then the nutritionist or physical trainer would set them up with a workout and meal plan catered to the user’s health goals.

User Testing:

When we tested this prototype with users, we received insight into how we should progress forward. Some of the functions our testers wanted to implement are featured workouts and recipes, to help guide the user make choices. Furthermore they suggested that we gamify our app to promote user retention because people like to keep track of their progress in fun ways. Finally, we got suggestions to merge certain menus such as nutrition and recipes, because they seem to occupy the same scope.

We also received comments about general details of the application, such as our lack of back buttons. Our users also said that although the concept is easy to understand, the application itself has an awkward workflow since the dashboard directs the user to certain functions while there are also navigation buttons at the bottom of the screen that do the same task. Furthermore, they liked the idea of having user consultations with nutritionists and personal trainers, but we should flesh out the concept. Some suggestions include a messaging or video call feature as well as an “At a Glance” screen that would organize the notes the nutritionist has for the user.

High Fidelity Prototype:

For our high fidelity prototype, we based our style on the mood of freshness and growth, leading us to choose a color palette of gray, green and pink. For our home screen we decided to have a page that shows a summary of all the things the user has been doing on the app. This would easily allow the user to get back into the flow of their previous session.

For our nutrition tab, we took our user criticism and merged nutrition and meal recipes together. In this tab we allow the user to set a dietary goal, and browse detailed nutritional recipes. The recipes are organized into categories that help the user find meals that suit their needs, such as high protein count, or vegetable centered dishes.

We decided to gamify the user’s progress by allowing them to grow plants based on achieving certain goals. For example completing a workout program will reward the user with a plant, showing the progress of its growth for every milestone. Having a unique plant for different achievements would allow users to grow unique gardens, and provide a personalized feel to the user experience.

For our fitness tab, we provide the user with many different exercise options to choose from. This includes multi-week programs, goal-driven workouts, and routines that help improve recovery and flexibility. We also include an extensive exercise library that allows users to discover new exercises with a search function that targets keywords such as muscle groups or names of exercises.

For our premium users, we offer consultations with personal trainers and nutritionists that will personalize meal plans or workouts to our users. Those who have not upgraded will not be able to access this feature. We decided that a premium upgrade for this type of feature is necessary, since the app would have to provide the health professionals with an income. Users can search for and choose their own nutritionists and physical trainers and be able to contact them through messaging and video calls. They will also have access to virtual appointments to check in with their progress and receive up to date coaching.

Reflection:

After working in a team for ten weeks to develop this design, I have learned that this experience was a great way for me to learn the difficulties and struggles of remote teamwork. The hardest part of the experience was the inability to effectively communicate with my teammates, because it is difficult to convey ideas through text and calls compared to face to face interaction. Our most effective solution was to dedicate a block of time every few days to hold team meetings where we update each other on our progress as well as to hold brainstorming sessions to tackle the challenges of the upcoming weeks.

Although this was only a design project, we believe with more time and resources, we could develop this into an actual mobile application. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic our app would not only be useful, but necessary, as social distancing could be the new normal for the next few years while scientists develop a vaccine. We believe that the success of our concept should not only be measured by how many people use the, but by how many lives that we would impact. Our primary goal with this concept is to assist the public in adapting to the changing environment and provide for the social good.