OJAS
One stop solution to eating healthy
The current dietary habits of urban Indians are a long way from an ideal diet. Working professionals are struggling to keep up with the demands of fast culture, causing their nutrition to take a backseat. Ojas is an application that aims to simplify eating healthy. The app is a comprehensive tool that simplifies eating healthy, by assessing user’s nutritional needs, planning the meals, delivering grocery/ food dishes and tracking the progress.
Deliverable
Concept of a Mobile Application
Duration
8 Weeks
My Role
User Research
Customer Journey Map
Feature Mapping
Interface Design
Prototype
Problem Statement
Current dietary habits of urban Indians are a long way from an ideal diet. Working professionals are struggling to keep up with the demands of fast culture, causing their nutrition to take a backseat.
“I want to eat better but it is not always easy. I run out of time, I run out of ideas or just not sure what is good for us.”
To understand the problem, I interviewed 8 young professionals from the metro cities. After the interviews, three prominent challenges emerged.
3 Major Roadblocks to eating healthy
1. Not knowing one’s own nutritional requirements
Most people don’t pay attention to their eating habits and nutritional requirements, till they find themselves trapped in a lifestyle-related disease.
2. Busy Schedule
In today’s fast-paced lifestyle, it seems easier to order food or to go for ready-to-eat food items, rather than to plan, buy grocery and cook.
3. Lack of motivation to stick to healthy eating
Even though one has planned meals in advance, it is tempting to eat a bag of chips while watching a series or order a pizza at the end of a tiring day.
Solution
An app based service that streamlines the process of eating healthy food. The goal of the app is to simplify eating healthy, by providing user with information about their nutritional needs, what food item matches best with their needs and helping them plan, procure and log the meals and track progress.
Primary Offerings
A schematic diagram of how the app will work
01 Health Assessment and Goal Setting
It is important to understand user’s nutritional requirements and food preferences before assigning any meal plan. What is the most accurate way to understand one’s health? After some research and brainstorming I came to a conclusion that blood test can give a reliable snapshot of the overall health of an individual. It helps diagnose deficiencies and/or identify potential health problems.
In the context of the app, every six months, an authorized lab assistant visits user’s home to collect blood sample. Based on the report, personal health goals are set for the user. After six months, blood test is done again to see if user has achieved their goals and new goals are set for the user.
Along with health assessment, user is also asked to complete a one-time questionnaire about his food preferences, allergies, religious restrictions etc. Health assessment result and personal info. collected from questionnaire is used to recommend the best possible meal plans.
02 Meal Planning
After goal setting, meal plans are recommended for every meal of the day. This is one of the most crucial flow in the app. On this screen, user takes a decision about what he is going to eat. User can follow the recommended plan as it is. If he finds it restrictive he can remove the existing food item, replace an item with a similar alternative or can add an entirely new food item.
User has the freedom to decide what he wants to eat, but what if he decides to make dinner out of french fries and burger? There has to be some feedback that will tell user if he is making the right choices or not.
Here comes the concept of food score. Food score is calculated based on the nutrients in any particular food. Food score is assigned on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the healthiest. It is also colour coded with red, yellow and green indicating increasing nutritional value. This helps user to validate/invalidate their decision.
Once a meal plan is finalised, many times user fails to comply with it. It is important to make user commit to the meal plan. In order to do that, user will have to choose if they want to cook that particular dish or order it from someplace. Then the user will be redirected to other apps to place a grocery order or a food delivery order. This will set a meal plan in action.
Overview Screen
Overview screen is one of the key screens in terms of decision making. Food score, remark and background colour give feedback to the user how healthy his meal plan is. This feedback can nudge the user to make healthier choices.
03 Food Logging
At the end of the day, app will remind the user to fill the food log. User can tick mark the food items they had, delete the ones they didn’t have and add anything they ate outside of the pre-planned meals. Act of logging food can make user more accountable to follow the meal plan. If the user keeps up the streak of eating healthy food for a month, he/ she is rewarded with vouchers.
04 Progress Tracking
To keep the users motivated, they need to know if they are making any progress in terms of eating healthy. If they are excelling, they will be motivated to keep doing it. If they are lagging behind on the goals, it can help them get back on track.
Based on the data of food log daily, weekly and monthly data visualisations are created to track the intake of nutrients.
Design Process
What’s a UX project without its process. You can go through in-depth documentation of user research, insights and rationale behind how I landed on the final designs and features. Tap on the button below to know about my design process.