industry health & wellness
skills design strategy, ux design, ui design
collaborators Tiffany Yue, Zirui Wang
time frame 1 month
For active young women who want to quantifiably understand their eating and fitness behaviors, balance is an integrated food tracking app that reframes food tracking in a healthy, holistic manner.
how balance works
Synced calorie burn for an already workout-quantification obsessed user. When activity is recorded on the FitBit or Apple Watch, the Balance Bar tilts in the exercise direction, indicating that the user has output more calories than input.
Streamlined food logging experience rounds calories to the 10's and uses GPS to present food options that the user is most likely to have eaten. After entry, the Balance Bar shifts again to account for calorie input.
The simple menu allows the user to see an overview of what they've eaten in that day.
One of my favorite features is the trends page, that takes a holistic approach to health - giving the user what looks like a magnetic field, and showing them their overall monthly or yearly balance.
the problem
Active young women who start tracking foods with an effort to "be healthier" find current solutions to be ineffective because they wrongly place emphasis on calorie counting. This prevents users from successfully creating ritual around using a food tracking application.
Unlike MyFitnessPal, balance offers a friendly alternative that moves the focus away from pedantic calorie counting and towards striking a healthy balance.
initial hypothesis
Our initial direction aimed to look at the abundance of data that those who self-quantify have. We hypothesized that people have a massive amount of data quantifying their body and its movements, but don't have the knowledge or tools to get the most value out of it.
initial insights
Generally, users feel satisfied with the way that exercise quantification services use their data.
No users had successfully created ritual around using a food tracking application.
adjusted hypothesis
Active young women who start tracking foods with an effort to "be healthier" find current solutions to be ineffective because they wrongly place emphasis on calorie counting. This prevents users from successfully creating ritual around using a food tracking application.
With more research, we created three personas:
The Uncommitted
The Health Hippies
The Number Crunchers
target persona: the number cruncher
Have had a lot of success with fitness tracking, love self-quantification, and they are looking for a healthy way to extend this to their food.
"I try to net zero...I ask myself, 'Do you feel like you ate more than you worked out?'" - A
"I don't use a food app - it makes you really neurotic about what you're eating." - G
"It feels like I'm depositing exercises. If you're making a lot of money but you don't get to see that money, then there's no point in making the money. I like to visually see that I'm working out." - Z
guiding design insights
Current solutions make accurate tracking a burden
Current solutions don't engage users long-term
Current solutions use calorie counting, which is the wrong framework for desirable eating for our target audience
Users aren't just thinking about food - they take into account exercise and budget when making food decisions
ideation on these insights
We aimed to take each insight and brainstorm solutions for features that we could then combine into a cohesive solution. Ultimately, we decided on the balance line, that makes data visualization the core of the app. Balance uses a trend based calendar and recipe storing software to help users reflect and grow in the long term, and it uses rounded calorie counts to make entering foods less pedantic.
prototyping and testing
The low fidelity wireframes were tested with users using the Prototype on Paper app to test user flow, data visualization intuitiveness, and minimum viable product features.
competitive landscape: My Fitness Pal
benefits
- accurate nutrition information
- customizable fitness/weight loss goals
drawbacks
- overwhelming number of food options
- tracking exact calories is cumbersome
- makes users feel neurotic
- loses long term engagement
next steps
balance is the minimum viable product for an app that we believe has a lot of potential to disrupt the food tracking landscape. On top of the steps detailed below, we would love to do research on how visualizations of eating and exercise can contribute to disordered eating (and learning how balance can help users avoid it).
