Discipline
Product Design, Brand Design
Timeline
May - Sept 2019
For
funnelfoods
Team
Six developers and one project manager
Tools
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe XD
User Research Methodologies
Ideation
Prototyping
Role
Designer Director at a Startup. conducting research, establishing visual design and UI
Illustrated by me
Summary
funnelfoods is a student-run, Hong Kong-based startup aiming to tackle the untapped market of healthy eating and grocery delivery. The goal was to create a MVP iOS application to pitch to startup accelerators and competitions.
I was tasked as the sole designer to design the brand and create prototypes for the application. I collaborated with marketing and developers on user research and pushing design changes.
The app created encourages healthy eating through food tracking. It uses computer vision to read receipts to track food items, and machine learning to suggest recipes suited to local customs and tastes. It sand order more food from local wet markets. It also makes is it convenient to stay healthy, by ordering the ingredients in-app for users directly from local wet markets and supermarkets. It has received verbal backing from venture capitalists and won prizes at local competitions.
Problem
In Hong Kong, according to a 2018 study by the Nielsen Company, more than half of participants report they are health conscious but find it difficult to do so.
From hypothesizing that food was the driving factor to maintaining a healthy lifestyle, I researched with this lens, with focus on the young-adult market. After conducting two surveys with 56 respondents, seven user interviews, three observational studies, competitive analysis, and secondary research, the main insight I drew was that:
People desire to become healthier, but lacked concrete awareness of how they ate and what to eat.
With preferences for shopping at wet-markets and cooking family-style meals, there was no tailored, localized solution to help Hong Kongers decide understand and help achieve a healthy lifestyle.
Opportunity
Hence, there was an opportunity to find out how we could encourage and create awareness for healthier eating habits. Given the nature and skillset of the team and the intent of the project, it solution was to be a digital application.
Core Experiences
funnelfoods is all-in-one food tracking app that keeps track of ingredients you own, suggest recipes based on available food and goals, and allows you to order more ingredients.
By giving relevant nutrition information and suggesting healthy, personalized recipes, it eases users’ healthiness worries. It also makes is it convenient to stay healthy, by ordering the ingredients in-app for users directly from local wet markets and supermarkets. Thus, a recurring cycle is born as the food they bought becomes tracked - keeping them on their goals.
Find out the full process here (Coming soon!).
List View
View at-a-glance data on your nutrition, spending and ingredient list, allowing you to be aware of how healthy you are.
Adding Ingredients
Add bought items via a photo of a receipt for it to be tracked, without the hassle of manual input.
Cook
Find recipes and plan meals, all customizable depending on nutrition goals and household size.
Recipe
See missing ingredients, nutrition information, tips. Order missing ingredients with a tap of a button, saving those oh-no moments when you forget to buy those chives
Cook
View a zoomed in view of the steps while cooking - no distractions.
Shop
Purchase missing ingredients straight to your doorstep, and compare prices across different stores and market types.
Save time going grocery shopping, and spend more time living life.
On-boarding
Fill in your food preferences and body metrics for the app to suggest the recipes you want to eat, just for you.
Improvements
Implement reward systems to incentive habit.
The app currently is reliant on data transparency and convenience to keep them motivated, but it may be more incentivizing if there was monetary rewards for doing so. It would be necessary to also research into habit building and key motivators.
Foster close vendor relationships to lower prices.
To actually implement a reliable and used shopping platform requires close relationships with local vendors - we could partner with existing platforms to do so.
Formalize health metrics with a nutritionist.
To legitimize our insights and propose recommendations for users, we would need to speak to nutritionists to see how to augment the application to best help users.
Reflection
While the project has come to a halt, the receipt scanning function and recipe suggestion algorithms are functional, which can be found here.
Overall, this was my first extensive project regarding product design, where I learnt more about the design process and prototyping. I really enjoyed the project as it was interesting to see how recent technologies like machine learning can be implemented into modern apps.
I am looking forward to seeing what will happen with this project!