UI/UX Case Study: Designing FoodBaby
Andrea Muljono, Winston Jodjana,Kenzie Mihardja, and Jevin Kosasih
Problem and Solution Overview
There is no doubt that many pregnant mothers care about the health of their future child. Having a nutritious diet during pregnancy is linked to good brain development and a healthy birth weight of a child, and can reduce the risk of many birth defects. However with pregnancy comes many rules that mothers must follow, such as what foods they should and should not eat. Currently, pregnant women need to contact their doctor or look through numerous web articles to decide which foods to eat, however their doctor may not always be available, especially with the growing shortage of OB-GYNs (doctors that specialize in care for women during their pregnancy). This is the motivation for FoodBaby, an application that tracks daily diets specifically for pregnant women to ensure they are receiving a healthy amount of nutrients. The app also allows women to search and determine which foods they can eat to ensure a safe pregnancy and healthy child.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
We decided to choose interviews and surveys to further research our design problem. Our stakeholders were pregnant women and their families who are concerned about proper nutrition to deliver a healthy baby. An interview was the most feasible strategy in order to better understand our target audience and the struggles they go through. Since the time duration of our target problem is quite large, observational methods and longitudinal studies were impractical. An interview allowed us to ask behavioral questions (challenges faced when deciding what to eat) and case questions (go-to foods when there isn’t time to prepare a meal). On the other hand, interviews were able to give us a better sense of what our target population is like. Surveys allow us to quantify our observations for statistical analysis. The quantitative data we get can be used to supplement an objective understanding of situations and events that affect pregnant women. We wanted a diverse group of participants from different backgrounds because the needs of each participant would be different. Consequently, we tried to contact participants from specific communities (Families of Color Seattle and our relatives) and general groups (Perinatal Support Washington). However, the support groups did not respond in time for interviews. As a result, we resorted to interviewing family and friends. Fortunately, having built a good relationship with our participants, we were able to have a more casual interview, helping participants to feel relaxed and talk about their personal stories and problems in more detail. We surveyed relatives and friends, which includes people of all ages but mostly from international communities. Furthermore, we were lucky enough to get a response from the support groups. As a result, we were able to achieve an ideal group of participants — a mix of participants from underrepresented communities, as well as the general community in the US.
Design Research Results and Themes
The main thing that the results of our research showed was how challenging pregnancy is. Through interviews and surveys, we discovered all the different challenges and inconveniences that pregnant mothers face. Especially as their pregnancy progresses, even simple things such as leaving the house for food becomes a huge chore. With this in mind, we wanted to not only ensure that these mothers are eating the right food, but that they would be able to easily do so. Pregnancy is hard enough as is!
Another thing that we’ve come to realize is the depths mothers would go through to make sure their baby is healthy. They are constantly looking for sources of information and cross-validating to make sure their information is correct. Contacting their personal doctors and nutritionists is theoretically the best way to go about doing so but not everyone has convenient access to these resources. Furthermore, what works for one person might not work for another and this is a huge concern that was consistently brought up. Through this, we realized the importance of making dietary information accessible and personalized to our potential users.
Our initial design ideas focused more on being a source of information for our users to go through. In a way, our ideas resembled Quora where mothers would be posting questions and doctors would be answering them on an online platform. While this idea still holds merit, our research showed that personalized information is key and we decided to pivot to a design that is more tailored to each individual user.
Proposed Design
Based on our research, we found that maintaining a healthy diet was a top priority for our participants. They have also mentioned that it can get quite tiring to keep track of their diet and what they should be eating next so therefore we wanted to cater to this task. This design also caters to the need of contacting expert help when it comes to questions about diet. Based on our user research, we believe that these two tasks were the most significant and this design best supports the user in these tasks.
Given that smartphones are the most widely used device, we decided to focus on a mobile application that they can integrate into their daily lives. Our app will allow mothers to directly input their meals into the app, which will calculate how much of each primary food group (protein, carbs, etc.) they have eaten by that time. The app will then give recommendations on which food group they should plan on eating by the end of the day to ensure they reach their daily nutritional goals. The potential interface for inputting meals and viewing daily progress can be seen from the top two designs on Figure 1, and a scenario in which the user would receive and act upon feedback from the app can be seen in Figure 2.
As shown in the bottom left diagram in Figure 1, we designed our app for women to directly interact with their doctor by messaging through the app. This encourages women to maintain regular conversations with their doctor and be able to receive quick answers regarding what foods they can or cannot eat. This chat feature would solve the problem of the difficulty to schedule in-person appointments between the busy doctors and patients simply to ask quick questions.
