Nutrition Made Easy with Nourish
I designed a mobile app made to empower users to prevent disease through diet, prioritizing simplicity and accessibility for older users. The ultimate goal was to transform nutritional research, which could be difficult to find and inaccessible, into something easy to understand and act upon for those at risk for chronic diseases.
Role: UX Researcher | UX Designer | Visual Designer
Overview
Nourish is designed to provide targeted nutrition research to individuals managing chronic diseases and their devoted caretakers. It helps its users make informed nutrition choices about foods shown to decrease risk of diseases or improve their health outcomes. Nourish shows users research-based findings on diet and chronic disease to allow people to make positive, targeted dietary changes in a simple and accessible manner.
User Research
I established our target user base and their needs early in the project. During this stage, I interviewed people who were at risk for a chronic disease or currently managing a chronic disease, as well as people who were acting as a caretaker to someone who was managing a chronic disease. I gathered their feedback to create user personas, empathy maps, and isolated some key quotes from the interviews.
Key Takeaways
User interviews revealed a strong sense of motivation to get better, but difficulty finding appropriate resources. Caretakers also mentioned a lack of time to seek out the resources they wanted, revealing a need for accessible and curated disease-related research, ideally with actionable steps to take to promote health. There was also an understandable sense of anxiety around users’ health, suggesting an opportunity emphasize user empowerment and encouragement within the app experience.
Lo-fi to Mid-fi Wireframes
After gathering information about the users’ painpoints and needs, it was time to start brainstorming solutions. Selected lo-fi and mid-fi wireframes are shown to the left, used to quickly ideate different approaches to the same design problem. After several iterations, these were some of the wireframes that most closely resembled the direction I would take for the initial product prototypes.
Visual Guidelines
I created visual guidelines to facilitate the process of creating the initial design components and prototyping. I opted for a simple green & white palette to lean into green’s associations with health and positive choices. I then introduced a softer, bluish set of reds as accent colors, which were eventually used to highlight foods that the user should be avoiding. For typography, I chose a legible font with with a larger base body text size to ensure older users could easily read content.
