FoodMood
Final Year Project FOODMOOD
How can we apply mindfulness-based interventions to encourage users to make healthier choices between mood and food?
Objective:
Integrate characteristics of Nutritional, Physical, and Mindfulness applications to provide personal interventions tailored to people's unique needs and development. Use an empathetic and informal cognitive approach to implement mindfulness activities, including thinking, remembering and learning to give back a sense of control ability on specific tasks and underlying behaviours. FoodMood focuses on a user-centred design based on inclusivity and empowering learning environment
Create a personalised system to adapt to an individual's goals and needs while allowing them to digest the information and progress at their own pace.
Functionality:
Food mood uses Mindfulness-based interventions to allow the user to recognise their negative triggers and provide them with a method to change their behaviour. Food mood implements "real-time self‐monitoring" around eating, behaviours and the feelings that go with it. The objective of monitoring is to allow users to be aware of what is happening at the moment and act on changing a particular behaviour that may seem automatic or beyond their control. Our approach follows daily food and mood logs, which will bring attention to benefit findings and negative triggers. It also offers individuals the opportunity to contact and share their experience with a health practitioner.
Pain points:
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Nutritional applications assist users in developing new healthy habits through better eating choices, meal tracking and logging and nutritional awareness (Pei-Yu Chi, 2008) (Jennifer Mankoff, 2002).
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Systems generally focus on calorie counting and weight loss, which can be restrictive, assuming individuals have linear progress. Health applications like wearable health devices such as Fitbit encourage an active lifestyle through self-health monitoring, performance updates and user-activated support through Data collection (Dias D, 2018).
The main challenge of this project was to provide an experience opposite from the stigmatised attitude of the health and diet culture. Integrating mindfulness with previous systems allows individuals to follow and be aware of the progress while adapting personal strategies.
Target Audience:
Our approach was to focus and accommodate a general audience. Our customer segment follows:
1. People who want to be consciously aware and track their eating and mood.
2. People who want to stop emotionally driven influences and negative habits.
3. People who want to make personal routines.
4. People who want to adopt coping strategies.
Responsibilities:
The project responsibilities were divided between Content and User Experience. As the User Experience designer, this section covers the benefits of design thinking carried out in each development stage. The responsibility entails creating user-friendly interfaces, designing simple and easy to understand interactions and developing solutions for user problems and anything associated with user interaction.
Understand: Empathise and Define
Understanding concerns and motivations are essential for empathy. User personas provided realistic representations in defining user characteristics such as behaviour patterns, goals, skills and attitudes. The process validated specific functionality and features of the app such as:
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Tracking emotions and mealtimes
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Notifications
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The ability to edit mealtime to accommodate the individual lifestyles
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Receiving suitable recommendations for food and activities to enhance emotional states
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Logging food and mood.
Explore: Ideate and Prototype
User flow uses the values of the previous research to identify what pages are essential, making it easier to create wireframes and help understand how the user would navigate from one page to another.
Prototyping evaluated the technical feasibility. Wireframes were a significant part of the design responsibility in the User experience to visualise the user interface without image and text. The prototype was developed on Figma to provide real-time collaboration, view the designs, and leave feedback to rapidly modify and improve the prototype while on the exploration phase.
Materialise: Test and Implement
Testing was necessary for evaluating usability and receiving focused feedback to help discover users' needs and expectations. Testing also identified constraints and functional gaps of interactions designs that could be improved and modified as the last process.
The other responsibilities outside of User Experience involved supporting the developments of the poster. It involved creating relative images for the content to communicate the problem and solution visually. The scale represents the problem FoodMood addresses, allowing the user to understand the foundation's basis and value. The customer journey provides visualisation of the steps and certain features available on the application. Elements of the interface provided a realistic representation of the mobile application to enable the audience to perceive a correct preview of the design and layout.
Design Challenges
Developing an intuitive design provides an effortless understanding of the architecture and navigation of the site. The prototyping and testing phase was essential to explore methods on how to make effective, intuitive navigation. In the initial development of the user-flow, three main pages were proposed among Home, Food and Mood. After conducting user research, exploring different wireframes and prototypes and distributing the content evenly, a 5-page interface was suggested in addition of Data and Link-up. The following heuristics and guidelines of user control and freedom and visibility status provided a basis for the approach in this design challenge.
Different navigation styles were designed and tested on google forms and evaluated to understand which navigation structure was the most intuitive and user friendly. A general group of users participated in the experiment to accommodate a broad target audience. Involving the users in the design process provided evidence supporting the benefits of a 5-page navigation. Distributing the information is a minimalistic design approach to enforce user control and visibility of system status in allowing users to understand the information and quickly access specific content and data.
The other challenge was creating an efficient and fast method to logging information. In key relevance of creating a user-centred design, a login button was the fundamental approach for enhancing flexibility, ease of learning and efficiency of use. The functionality of this design element would allow the users to log and input specific data despite the page they are on. The findings of the meal board survey and the usability testing acknowledged both positive and negative results of the editable feature to customise mealtimes. The responses indicated the impractical function that restricts them to input logs unless active on the specific page. E.g., to input meals, the user must navigate to the home page or food page to add their content. The learning outcomes identified the need for a log button to essentially support the previous design challenges of customisation and intuitive design
References:
Pei-Yu Chi, J.-H. C., 2008. Enabling Calorie-Aware Cooking in a Smart Kitchen. In: Persuasive Technology. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. s.l.:Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 116-127.
Jennifer Mankoff, G. H. H. C. H. L. N., 2002. Using Low-Cost Sensing to Support Nutritional Awareness. In: UbiComp 2002: Ubiquitous Computing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. s.l.:Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 371-378.
Dias D, P. S. C. J., 2018. Wearable Health Devices-Vital Sign Monitoring. Systems and Technologies.