Creating a Healthy Relationship with Nutrition

PFuel, Guidance for nutrition at your fingertips

The Introduction

PFuel was created to help combat the pain of meal planning, counting calories, and being active all while maintaining a busy schedule. But our team didn't arrive at this solution right away - first, we talked about what options and problems we were noticing in the world, and after coming to a conclusion that health and fitness was something we wanted to explore we actually started doing research on businesses as well as user interviews so we could understand what problem space we really needed to fill.

To address these needs, we performed multiple rounds of research and design iteration to reach these goals. Through our testing, we were able to make iterations on the existing design to create a fun, user-friendly, and delightful experience for users.

The Scope

UX Incubator

Partner Company: Peloton

The Project

Goal: Native Mobile App

Create a product to fill an existing problem space as a sub-brand for an existing company.

The Timeline

2 Week Sprint

12/20/21 - 01/07/22

The Team

UX Designers

Chloe Mason

Angel Luk

Esther Kim Do

Jose Luis Gamboa-Droguett

Discovering the Problem

Due to the ongoing state of the Covid-19 pandemic, more and more people are struggling to balance their health goals with ever-changing guidelines and shutdowns. Balancing busy work, family, and social schedules it can be hard to make time or space to prioritize healthy eating. As a team we approached this problem space by asking ourselves, how might we give users control over their fitness and meal plan goals? To answer this question, we performed business research, user interviews, multiple rounds of usability testing, and created multiple iterations of the prototyped design.

Our Process

01 RESEARCH

02 DESIGN

03 TESTING

04 CONCLUSION

01. Research

To get started we had to understand Peloton and the market we were looking to break into. We started by analyzing their business model and taking a look at current nutrition apps to understand competitor and comparator features. We found a few insights through that round of research but wanted to be sure that our suggestions were firmly backed by the research. As a team, we were able to interview 5 people who were passionate about maintaining a healthy lifestyle. From all of this research, we were able to find that there were certain insights and findings that we wanted to focus on, the most notable being:

Interview Findings:

Time

With limited time in the day, users need a way to have quick easy meals that keep them away from fast-food options.

Diet Culture

Users need guidance on understanding their caloric intake as something beyond diet culture and using that information to meet their health goals.

Nutritional Guidance

Users value nutritional information from a reputable source. In addition to guidance to keep them motivated and on track with their goals.

Persona

To reference our target demographic and users throughout our process, we created Ally. She is a busy marketing professional who wants to live healthier but doesn't always have the time or motivation to stick to her goals. As our team moved through our process we made sure to keep Ally's goals, needs, and frustrations in mind. We wanted to make sure we weren't designing what we wanted but what Ally needs.

Journey Map

As a team, we wanted to be able to visualize Ally's journey throughout her day. We see that while she has some high points she is still experiencing quite a few low points in her day when it comes to her calorie intake and relationship with food.

Ally starts her morning off on the right foot by making a smoothie. But on her way to work, she stops at a local coffee shop to get a coffee and pastry because she is still hungry. She tries to redeem herself by eating a salad for lunch but still finds herself hungry in the afternoon so ends up snacking on chips. After the ups and downs of her workday Ally takes a spin class, reaches her calorie burn goal, and drinks a protein shake for dinner. Then she spends the evening out with friends enjoying sugary drinks and orders a pizza as a late-night snack once she gets back home. We want to keep these high and low points of Ally's day in mind because it will help us connect to our target users as we move forward in the process. To make sure that we meet all of Ally's needs as well as documenting any opportunities that we can find to improve Ally's day.

02. Where Insights Meet Design

For us to turn these previous insights from research into a design we had to think about the features they become. The following are these insights and the potential features that as a team we have thought about creating:

Progress Tracking

Progress tracking for quick views of daily goals, such as water intake.
An in-depth view of progress over time.
Connection with Apple Health, Peloton, and Apple Watch to use existing exercise data to track progress towards goals.

Meal Plan

Healthy recipes tailored to users' health goals or food sensitivities.
Recipes and tutorials curated by celebrity chefs.
Daily tracking of upcoming meals and calories consumed.

Suggestions

Meal plan section.
Suggested weekly and daily recipes for a balanced diet.
Tracking for balanced macros.

Expert Advice

Access to professional nutritionists to help users reach their fitness goals.
Personalized plans created by nutritionists.
Direct messaging to licensed nutritionists.

The Creation

As a team, we iterated on the existing design starting with a round of design studio. This allowed us to start with basic visualization and come together on the layout that we imagined for these features. From this point, we created a mid-fidelity version of our design to test the basic navigation to make sure it was intuitive to our users before distracting them with colors and visuals. Based on the feedback we received during our second round of usability testing, we compiled a list of changes that we incorporated into our final high-fidelity mockups before assessing the readiness to present our concept to stakeholders.

Evolution of PFuel

03.Testing Our Theories

The following is a summary of the feedback we received from each usability test, and the design changes we made to the MidFi prototype as a result.

Features to adjust:

Featured Celebrity recipes will be scrollable rather than having to click "get inspired".
Have the filter options for recipes come up in the search rather than at the top of the recipe page.

Once our design was complete, we ran another round of usability testing. For our second round of testing, we recruited 5 individuals to run through the same four tasks. Our team found that the success rate of the tasks decreased in our second round of testing. Additionally, the time on tasks decreased in the second round of usability testing. This could be due to participants taking in the branding and visual elements displayed to them. However, a few recommendations we added to our design were:

Change the log-in button to match the get started button.
Update the default setting for the meal plan to be the daily view rather than the weekly view.

Conclusion

04. Conclusion

We would like to launch PFuel with the guidance and partnership of Peloton to increase the performance of their current user base in addition to expanding into the market of users wanting to improve their nutrition and live a healthy lifestyle. We are also looking to add more features to the app to enhance users' experience, adding more workout videos and celebrity cooking videos. As well as working with some companies such as Instacart, Amazon Fresh, and Vimeo to integrate their APIs into our app to provide the best possible user experience. In addition, we hope to further integrate with the peloton system to provide users that already subscribe to Peloton’s current exercise framework to either allow them exclusive content or further incentive for engaging with our application and reaching their health and
fitness goals.

Overall, the experience working on PFuel ended up being an amazing learning possibility for us as a team. We were able to come together and iterate on design while working to create a platform that will work with Peloton to allow users a better understanding and control over their health and fitness goals.