Food Filter

OVERVIEW

Food Filter is a tool designed to help parents quickly and easily identify important nutritional information when grocery shopping in order to help feed their families healthier food.

The tool was created as part of an iterative design project that began with identifying an issue, proposing a solution, then developing the project through methods including doing background research, creating personas and empathy & journey maps, and performing user testing with mockups. The goal of Food Filter is to keep things clear and simple while helping parents better feed their families and fighting childhood obesity.

Why Food Filter?

For parents of children ages 5-12, it’s a constant challenge to make sure their children are eating right and staying active. Day in and day out, these parents work hard to make sure their families are living healthy lifestyles.

The main problem many of these parents face is finding the time and the best resources to tackle this problem while juggling so many other responsibilities. Today, there is no one best solution for every parent and family and the growing childhood obesity epidemic in the US suggests a lack of viable and sustainable options for this enormous problem. According to The Partnership for a Healthier America, children with obesity have three times more healthcare expenditures than children at healthy weights, costing an estimated $14 billion every year. If this trend continues, future generations will be even more plagued with issues in adulthood associated with childhood obesity, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.

If only there were a better way to address the main factors contributing to childhood obesity—as the Mayo Clinic puts it, “Lifestyle issues—too little activity and too many calories from food and drinks”, parents could proactively promote a healthier lifestyle, leading to a higher quality of life for their children both now and in the future. At a prevalence of 18.5%, obesity affects almost 14 million children and adolescents in the US, and nearly one in three are considered either to have obesity or to be overweight. With this number having risen ten-fold over the past four decades, there is a clear opportunity to empower millions of people and their families to lead better lives.

Process

Once I’d identified the issue of childhood obesity as the focus for my project, I had in mind an idea for something, in the form of an app, to help users make healthier choices at some point in the process; I just needed to figure out at what point I wanted to inject my solution. To do this, created a few tools to help me strategize:

• a persona; this represents a cluster of users who exhibit similar motivations and behavioral patterns. Using a persona can help humanize complex background data by creating a prototypical representative to understand the user, their motivation, and pain points. It can also help identify potential opportunities for solutions.

• an empathy map; this helps further uncover how users are feeling by creating examples of what they say, do, think, and feel.

• current state journey map; this puts on display clearly identified actions and processes that are currently being used, helping to identify where pain points are occurring and providing an opportunity to interject a solution.

With these tools created, I was able to have a better picture of whom I would be developing what for. In this case, Chris Klein, a time-strapped single mother, was overwhelmed, on a budget, and deeply desired to provide a healthy lifestyle for her family. I chose to propose a solution that would become part of her shopping routine.

This is my proposed future state journey map:

You’ll see that the current state journey map and the future state journey map both have the same start and finish… Chris arrives at the store and leaves to go home with the groceries to cook for her family. What’s different here is an extra stage injected into the process: Chris uses an app that indicates the types of food she’s considering buying to help create her more balanced meals, warning her of excessive nutritional aspects such as excess saturated fats, calories, sodium, and sugar… the app helps Chris sort between healthier and less healthy options, like a filter; hence the name Food Filter.

Here is a link to an info deck with screen shots of mock ups, results of my user testing, and other background information:

FOOD FILTER

Takeaways

After presenting this project, there are a few things I would do differently. Mainly, I’d follow the “less is more” approach I used in the scanner itself and apply that to the instruction pages. I felt like having access to the descriptions would be beneficial to the users, but realize that having screens full of definitions can make a tool that was created to be simple appear more complicated than it actually is. The redesign would likely include links to this info laid out with simple explanations and recommendations on healthier eating for those want to further empower themselves on taking better caring for their families and fighting childhood obesity.