AI-Powered App - Bitewise
Project Overview
- Objective: To design a nutrition tracking app that uses AI to suggest personalized meals based on users’ dietary preferences and goals. The app also allows users to track their caloric intake, focusing on simplicity and an intuitive user experience.
- Target Audience: Health-conscious individuals, fitness enthusiasts, and those seeking to improve their diet with personalized meal suggestions and easy caloric tracking.
The goal was to create a nutrition app that harnesses AI to personalize meal suggestions while providing users with an intuitive interface to track calories and achieve their dietary goals. The design emphasizes simplicity, accessibility, and ease of use to help users maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Research
- Competitive Analysis: Analyzed several nutrition and fitness tracking apps that provide meal personalization and caloric tracking. The focus was on identifying the best practices for ease of use, personalization, and data accuracy, ensuring that the app would stand out in a crowded market. With AI being relatively new, this would provide an upper hand over similar apps.
- User Expectations: Users expect an app that provides personalized meal recommendations, makes tracking calories easy, and offers clear, actionable insights into their nutritional habits.
Key Takeaways
- Users seek a seamless, easy-to-navigate app with automatic tracking and personalized meal suggestions.
- Caloric intake tracking should be simple and require minimal effort from the user.
- Personalization is crucial for engagement; users want meal suggestions that align with their dietary preferences and fitness goals.
User Personas
Anna Thompson
- Age: 28
- Occupation: Marketing Professional
- Location: San Francisco, CA
- Goals: Anna is looking for a simple way to manage her diet and caloric intake while balancing a busy schedule. She needs meal suggestions that align with her health goals and calorie targets.
- Frustrations: Anna finds it frustrating when apps are cluttered or require too many steps to log meals. She prefers apps that automatically track calories with minimal input.
- Behaviors: Anna uses fitness and nutrition apps regularly but prefers those that provide quick, personalized recommendations and easy tracking of her daily caloric intake.
- Needs: A straightforward, user-friendly app that offers personalized meal suggestions based on her goals and automatically tracks her caloric intake.
James Blake
- Age: 35
- Occupation: Software Developer
- Location: New York, NY
- Goals: James is focused on building muscle and needs an app that suggests high-protein meals and tracks his caloric intake to ensure he meets his dietary needs.
- Frustrations: James dislikes apps that don’t provide enough variety in meal suggestions or make it difficult to track specific macronutrients like protein.
- Behaviors: James uses apps to track his macros and calories daily. He wants a streamlined, efficient app that provides actionable meal suggestions and caloric breakdowns.
- Needs: An app that provides personalized, AI-generated meal suggestions, tracks his calorie intake, and helps him meet his nutritional goals.
Ideation
- Sketching: Developed wireframes focused on a simple layout that ensures quick access to personalized meal suggestions, daily caloric tracking, and easy navigation.
- Wireframing: Created low-fidelity wireframes with clear sections for meal suggestions, daily caloric intake tracking, and nutritional breakdowns. Focused on a clean, uncluttered interface to enhance usability.
- Color Palette: Chose a modern palette of white, black, and earthy green. The green adds a natural, health-focused touch, aligning with the app’s wellness goals, while the black and white provide contrast for readability and modernity.
The design focused on creating a visually appealing, clean app that allows users to interact with personalized meal suggestions and easily track their calories in a seamless, engaging way.
Design Decisions
- Typography: Selected DM Sans, a clean sans-serif font for a modern, legible look that ensures users can easily read through meal suggestions and track their caloric intake without distraction.
- Personalized Meal Suggestions: The AI provides users with personalized meal recommendations based on their preferences and goals. This is the app's core feature, and it is designed to be intuitive, offering relevant options without overwhelming the user.
- Calorie Tracking: Integrated an easy-to-use system that automatically tracks the calories of the meals users log, giving them instant feedback on their daily intake and progress toward their goals.
- Navigation: Simplified the app’s navigation with a bottom navigation bar featuring three main sections: Meal Suggestions, Personal Journey, and User Settings and Preferences. This allows users to switch between key features effortlessly.
- Visual Hierarchy: Larger, bold typography for key information like meal suggestions and daily caloric intake, with smaller text used for secondary information such as macro breakdowns and meal details.
- Color Palette: Used white as the primary background to ensure clarity and focus on content. Black was used for text to maintain readability, while earthy green was applied to buttons, highlights, and progress bars to subtly reinforce the app’s health-focused theme.
The design decisions prioritized clarity, ease of use, and personalization, ensuring that the app would offer a smooth, engaging user experience while providing actionable insights into users' diets and caloric intake.
Prototyping
- Tools: Developed high-fidelity prototypes using Figma, focusing on interactive elements like meal suggestions and caloric intake tracking.
- Interactivity: Incorporated dynamic elements such as meal customization, progress updates, and interactive calorie tracking to simulate a real-world user experience.
The prototype was designed to reflect a smooth, user-friendly interaction, with a focus on simplicity and intuitive features that would make calorie tracking and meal management seamless for users.
Usability Testing
- Test Method: Conducted usability testing with 5 participants to assess how easily they could input their dietary preferences, receive meal suggestions, and track their daily caloric intake.
- Feedback: Users appreciated the personalized meal suggestions and the ease of tracking calories, but some expressed the need for more detailed macronutrient breakdowns.
- Changes: Expanded the nutritional breakdowns to include more detailed information on macros (protein, fat, carbs) for each meal, allowing users to make more informed decisions.
Testing confirmed that the app’s core features were highly effective, but enhancements were made to improve clarity and the level of detail in the nutritional data presented.
Final Design
- Final Deliverables: Delivered a polished, high-fidelity design in Figma. The app’s core functionalities were implemented with an emphasis on a clean, user-friendly interface.
- Outcome: The final design successfully provided personalized meal suggestions, simplified calorie tracking, and offered users an intuitive, engaging experience. The app's simplicity, coupled with its powerful AI engine, ensured that users could easily track their meals and make healthy dietary choices.
The final design met the project objectives by providing users with a sleek, effective app that made meal tracking easy and personalized while maintaining a modern, accessible user interface.
Reflection
- What Worked: The AI-powered personalization feature was a standout success, offering users relevant meal options that aligned with their dietary preferences and goals. The clean design and intuitive navigation contributed to a positive user experience.
- Challenges: One challenge was ensuring the AI suggestions were diverse enough to meet the needs of users with specific dietary restrictions, but this was addressed by expanding the meal options and adding more customization features.
- Future Improvements: Future updates could include integration with fitness trackers and meal prep features, such as grocery lists based on meal plans, to further enhance the app's functionality and user experience.
The app was a success, providing personalized nutrition recommendations in an accessible, user-friendly way. However, there is always room for future improvements and added features to enhance the user experience.
Tools Used:
