UX Research
People track the food they eat to keep track of calories and other metrics to help monitor their weight and other health goals. Since the pandemic started in March of last year, more people have been consistently cooking at home than ever. The currently existing digital products make it difficult to get an accurate count of metrics from recipes of food cooked at home.
I was interested in creating a product for adult home cooks who are trying to easily and accurately count macros and calories to reach a goal weight.
My task was to learn about how home cooks currently use digital tools to track the food they eat, and what goals they are trying to achieve with these products. Then, I needed to help brainstorm the features that would be most beneficial to potential users and help set our app apart.
After conducting interviews and surveys with real people who had used nutrition tracking apps in the past, I discovered that the current process for tracking food was not easy and often encouraged eating less healthy processed/ prepackaged food to get the most accurate information. This was frustrating to almost every user I talked with and the roadblocks to easily track home cooked meals is what often lead users to quit using these apps altogether.
“It often seems like these apps are pushing me towards eating out or processed foods just because it’s easier track. This seems counterintuitive to my overall goal of losing weight and being healthy”
Users wanted to use these apps to make sure their calorie intake for the day was in an acceptable weight loss range. They also wanted to be able to see tangible proof of their progress. But they wanted to do so using food that they had prepared
In aggregating the information I got from user interviews, I was really able to see what people did and did *not* like about similar apps. This allowed me to start brainstorming where we needed to set ourselves apart
The two features that I gathered would be the most important to potential users of the app were:
a way to track the correct nutritional information based off a recipe they used to prepare food themselves and
a way to make sure they were still on track with their targeted weight loss goal.
I did a lot of concept sketching to get the general idea and eventually came up with these mock ups of what those screens might look like.
Users want to use products like this, but they need the products to work for them. In running this research study I learned just how big the opportunity is for our company. When the majority of users are complaining about a lack of a feature in the market place, we should try to figure out how to make that feature a reality.
Ultimately the next steps for this app are to:
run a large scale survey to validate the findings
create a wireframe to begin outlining potential user flow
collaborate with the engineers to make sure they can code what our users have been dreaming up