People who are concerned with diabetes like to be smart about what they’re eating. Thus, they can minimize their visits to go see a doctor and save their expenses on drugs.
People who are concerned with diabetes like to be smart about what they’re eating. Thus, they can minimize their visits to go see a doctor and save their expenses on drugs.
MyWelly is an app that provides healthy diabetic friendly recipes. It motivates users to explore new and creative recipes by managing their health at home. The users will feel empowered and connected to by joining communities and/or making new friends through the app. Thus, it will improve their lifestyles. The main goal is to help users to feel encouraged & connected while they’re going through diabetes.
Gestational diabetes is the most common medical complication of pregnancy, affecting between 1% to 45% of pregnancies depending on population and diagnostic criteria. We found that the use of digital health interventions were associated with better glucose control and lower weight gains over pregnancy, which reduces the risk of complications for both baby and mother during delivery.
- PLOS Digit Health, 2022 Feb 24.
We want to know how people prepare their meals when they are concerned with diabetes, and their emotional/financial aspects on it, so that we can aim to launch a digital product that will improve their lifestyle.
1. Interview
Learn basic information about their lifestyles while they’re concerned with diabetes. The reasons why they had the concerns and what they used to enjoy(mainly food but life in general) before and how changing the lifestyle has been challenging for them. What improvement they’re expecting a digital product to have. It will give us a better idea of their preferences, goals, emotional, financial aspects of it if they have any.
2. Survey
It will help us solve the problem when we hear from more people who have the same/similar goals. This will have us come up with statistics of the user's,and make us think how we can bring more potential users who are not fully interested in the topic.
Takeaways
• All brands seem to encourage users and help to achieve their goals.
• All brands offer to make commitments for users.
• All of them provide healthy meals.
Opportunities
• The new design will be friendly and soothing that appeals to the audience, so that they feel relieved while they’re using the app.
• We can provide a short video when we present a new recipe.
• The users can interact with the dietitian or people who are using the app.
• Affordable and offers free menu to try before commit to a subscription.
Affinity mapping helped greatly in defining major pain points. It was a useful tool in
extracting insights and finding common ground among users as well as practicing empathy.
• Users want to see results soon in terms of medical changes by receiving advice from professionals such as a dietitian, nutritionist, or a doctor.
• Some of the users showed genuine interest to make commitments to use an app, if it’s reliable and affordable.
• The users had desire to have a community.
• It is time consuming to find good recipes, as the digital products that they’re using are not user friendly, cluttered, and impersonal.
• The users expect to learn recipes by watching videos and want to feel engaged while they’re on it.
Emotional health is another aspect to consider, while they’re going through diabetes. They tend to encounter stress due to limitations of food and/or activities they used to enjoy,such as interacting with a certain person or group of people, asthey have to be pickier, in terms of eating, than before when they meet them.
I’d like to explore ways to help an individual who is going through diabetes to feel like she has a community to build a connection and receive encouragement from, while she explores new recipes. Because she only has a limited view of her medical condition by gathering information online on her own, and trying to remember her doctor’s suggestions.
How might we help users to feel connected and encouraged while they’re going through diabetes?
Using insights from both my subject matter expert interview and topic research, I created a persona that reflected my target user base.
I was able to create a sitemap to focus on core features of the product. I developed the architecture of the app to organize the pages within the site.
These user and task flows will help hypothesizing that users would navigate through key screens and determine which wireframe to create. Task 1: Joining a CommunityTask 2: Finding a New RecipeTask 3: Sign Up
To visualize the task & user flows, I started with pencil sketches of main screens, then transferred them to digital versions – mid fidelity wireframes. It helped to build the overall design and make iterations before I go further to the next step.
The UI design of the product will look fun, new, modern, yet feels trustworthy while users are enjoying scrolling through appetizing images. I’ve enjoyed every part of it. Especially, I think creating icons was the most fun part. It gives a lot of personality to the brand that elevates the look and feel to the audience.
The following are the primary screens that can be accessed from the bottom
navigation bar.
Revised the main landing page to be simpler and cleaner, and moved the personal
dashboard to profile page
Added profile, review and comments on recipes, so that it feels more like social media
Increased overall text sizes
Added filter to search options
It seems great for not only people with diabetes but also people who are looking for healthier recipes. I love how it connects with local markets so I can conveniently order ingredients right off from the recipe! I would like to use the app if it's out there :)
To make it look more social, it could have bigger profile photos or recipe representing icon for many experience stories.
After testing the product on 8 participants, I addressed the solutions to improve the design based on users feedbacks.
• The users said they were open to have more friends or communities as they wanted to share their experiences and stories with others. I received positive feedbacks on having connections via this app.
• People didn't mind having conversation in the recipe page, as they craved having interaction with people who were going through diabetes.
• Users loved the idea of having the feature that people can purchase the ingredients after they read the recipe.
