About the project
The project: “ARfit” is for a hackathon hosted by Accedo. The teams had 10 hours to design, build, and present a product that required the use of AR. The team consisted of 1 designer and 4 developers. I lead the design and general aspect of the project while working alongside a technical lead.
The Problem
It has been increasingly hard in tracking what you have eaten throughout the day. With the trend in becoming more healthy and leading a more active lifestyle, measuring and tracking macros is becoming a larger challenge. “How many calories? Does it meet my protein intake? Did I eat too much sugar?” These are some of the questions we ask ourselves throughout our day.
Currently, there are apps that exist in the market that help people track, but are troublesome to enter. Most apps, the user has to enter the food item and search on a list for an item that closely identifies. My team and I want to focus on how to make this process more seamless so that the user can enjoy eating and not worrying inputting and searching.
The User
Joanie Fran is a persona that we feel would be a huge user of ARfit. Joanie Fran is an active young professional who lives in the city. She is incredibly trendy and competitive with a multiple of things going on in her life. Due to her busy lifestyle, time is incredible precious and scarce. She tries her best to keep in-between tasks to a minimal.
She recently got into the lifestyle of staying active and healthy. She hired a trainer and now has strict guidelines for both physical activity and diet.
We pieced the persona “Joanie Fran” through observation and interviews among individuals that fit within our target market. We then later brainstormed and pulled in key personality and lifestyle traits to create Joanie Fran.
User Journey
We constructed a journey map for Joanie Fran. We evaluated how her after work life would look like, and identified any pain points.
As Joanie gets off work, she heads to the gym to get her body in tip top shape. She hired a trainer to help her stay focused. Unfortunately, her trainer has asked her to record everything she eats to achieve her fitness goals. This becomes an annoyance to Joanie as this requires her to add an activity in her already busy lifestyle.
As she finishes her gym session, she heads to a local healthy eats with her friends. As soon as she orders her food, she is excited to take photos of her food to share with her friends on social media. She becomes frustrated as after she finishes taking photos, she has to input and search what she’s eating through an app (MyFitnessPal). Hungry after an intense gym session, she has to search through a large list of potential dishes that matches closely to her dinner.
Coming up with the solution
After identifying pain points in Joanie’s journey, we sat down and brainstormed ways we could potentially solve this problem of excessive time wasted in inputting what she ate.
I made sure that the team ideas revolved around the user, and not just technical requirements. The key areas we wanted to focus on to help Joanie were:
- Simple to use
- Seamless
- Requires as minimal input as possible
- Usage of AR
- Overall, minimal time used
With those parameters in our mind, we started drawing wireframes on the whiteboard, and then translating them in sketch.
We came up with a simple flow:
- The user will open their phone camera with our app
- In the background, the app will utilize Google’s Lens technology and vast database to analyze and send information back.
- The information is then displayed to the user
The solution has its limitations. Although it required no input, there is time required to have the user tap onto the object, hold the object within the view of the camera, having the database analyze, and find information on what is being captured. The time it took required was minimal, but it still causes an unpleasent experience for the user expecting a quick solution.
We made modifications in our final designs to try to ease the user to hide what was going on in the background. With just native spinners, the app looked boring, and it made it look like it lagged a lot. To solve this, we made it more “fun”, and personable by adding a character.
additional features
We've added a dashboard and history to help the user keep track on what was eaten and record it
