Case study: The app that helps you maintain a balanced everyday life
By: Emilia Lungu
Tags: User Research, UX, Nutrition, User Experience, Case Study

Case study: The app that helps you maintain a balanced everyday life

Overview

MacroFit is a solo concept mobile app created during my first week as a General Assembly student. It was developed as a quick and rough exercise to explore the design process of creating a mobile application.

This project took a deep dive into my subject’s attitudes and behaviours surrounding fitness and nutrition. The case study below will take you through my design process in defining and developing a solution to the user’s problem for this concept.

Discovery

Understanding Max’s pain points

My main goal for this project was to understand Max’s lifestyle and relationship with nutrition so I could enhance his experience.

During my interviews with fitness enthusiast Max, I discovered the need for an app that would offer users the possibility to easily track their macronutrient intake throughout the day. Food packages contain the nutritional information you need to calculate your daily macros, but a more efficient way to keep track of your intake is by simply logging your food in an app.

Max and I during our interview

Some of the key points that I learned during our interviews are the following:

Max meal preps at the end of every day and follows a simple diet

and Enjoys finding new recipes

Has used other apps in the past but found them too elaborate and hard to use

Needs to quickly track his water consumption on a daily basis

on a daily basis He is not a big fan of phone notifications but wouldn’t mind to receive reminders throughout the day to drink water

By tracking his macros, he can make sure that he fuels his body with the right type of energy to perform, have energy throughout the day, build muscle and maintain hormonal balance. In other words, no matter what his goal is, he wants to be healthy therefore knows that it’s important to eat within the right macro ratio.

To further analyse the data from my interviews with Max, I created an experience map to show the common frustrations that arose. The area boxed in red shows the key pain points I discovered:

Defining a problem statement

This has then led me to the following problem statement:

Define

With a clear idea of Max’s pains, gains and motivations, I launched into an iterative design process to develop a meaningful solution. Below you can see some initial sketches of the low-fidelity prototype screens in development.

I wanted to keep it simple and focused: macro tracking with carb, protein and fat intake with the option to add meals, snacks and water. Research shows you’re 4x more likely to reach your health goals simply through daily tracking. This is an easy solution that best addressed Max’s frustrations.

Illustrating a scenario:

To better illustrate how this app would fit into Max’s life to solve his problem, I drafted this storyboard with an accompanying outcome statement:

Develop

Before making the prototype, I started by creating a user flow where I defined the main functionalities of the app — users can add a meal to their diary: they will search for their meal, view nutritional information and input the quantity. From here, they can add another item or click ‘Done’ and be redirected to the home page where they can see the updated progress bar with the new nutritional values. On the User profile page, users can access a summary of their progress.

A feature that exists within the app but hasn’t been captured in the below user flow is the option to record the water intake.