HF Leaf is a Charleston-based organization focused on food sustainability. The organization needs a tool that helps people learn about and manage their food nutrition. HF Leaf’s primary target users include college students and adults who are concerned with the health and calorie would like to learn more about new recipes and keep.
40% of take-out food and ready-to-eat food from are not health for people in the United States. The strategy team at HF Leaf has identified general knowledge about food nutrition as crucial for keeping healthy.
Design an app that will improve education on the topic of healthy food and help people manage their own meals.
UX designer leading the app and responsive website design from conception to delivery.
Conducting interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, iterating on designs, determining information architecture, and responsive design.
I used HF’s data on healthy food to develop interview questions, which were then used to conduct user interviews. Most interview participants reported feeling badly about cooking time waste or eating the monotonus meals, but they didn’t actively try to learn easy way to cook with healthy recipes. The feedback received through research made it very clear that users would be open and willing to work towards eliminating food waste if they had access to an easy-to-use tool to help guide them.
Problem statement:
Raymond is a architect who needs reminders, suggestions, and coaching to cook more often with full-of-nutrition ingredients because they like to cook every day and want to make it a part of their routine.
An audit of a few competitor’s products provided direction on gaps and opportunities to address with the HF Leaf app.
I did a quick ideation exercise to come up with ideas for how to address gaps identified in the competitive audit. My focus was specifically on nutrition tracking and healthy recipe features.
After ideating and drafting some paper wireframes, I created the initial designs for the Healthy Food Leaf (HF Leaf) app. These designs focused on delivering personalized guidance to users to help manage their food.
To prepare for usability testing, I created a low-fidelity prototype that connected the user flow of viewing an item about to expire and using it in a recipe.
These were the main findings uncovered by the usability study:
People want easy access to recipes know where they are exactly while in the recipe page.
People had difficulty finding list after complete the saved task.
People preferred remain some specific preference until next logging in.
Based on the insights from the usability studies, I applied design changes like providing a clear headline section in the recipe choices screen.
Additional design changes included adding a page for log in step before the homepage appearance, and also adding a choice for logging in with using as an unknow person to separate two kinds of homepage content.
The high-fidelity prototype followed the same user flow as the low-fidelity prototype, including design changes made after the usability study.
Clear labels for interactive elements that can be read by screen readers.
Initial focus of the home screen on personalized recommendations help define the primary task or action for the user.
With the app designs completed, I started work on designing the responsive website. I used the HF Leaf sitemap to guide the organizational structure of each screen’s design to ensure a cohesive and consistent experience across devices.
The designs for screen size variation included mobile, tablet, and desktop. I optimized the designs to fit specific user needs of each device and screen size.
Users shared that the app made healthy food seem like something they could actually help keep nutrition balance. One quote from peer feedback was that “the HF Leaf app helps bring caring about the health recipe to a personal level in a way that’s easy and engaging.”
I learned that even though the problem I was trying to solve was a big one, diligently going through each step of the design process and aligning with specific user needs helped me come up with solutions that were both feasible and useful.
Conduct research on how successful the app is in reaching the goal to improve healthy recipes and fitness recipes.
Add more educational resources for users to learn about food nutrition.
Provide incentives and rewards to users for successfully keep meals healthily and learn new recipes.
