For building healthy eating habits
Fitbit
Helping young adults to build and maintain healthy eating habits through talking with my future self
timeline
4 weeks
Oct - Nov 2022
members
Inje Kang,
Xingyi Zhou,
Rohan Pinto,
Riddhi Jiotode
role
UX Research,
Ideation,
Design Concept,
User Testing,
UI Design
Interaction Design
Introduction
Redesign Fitbit App to build and maintain healthy eating habits
Many young adults struggle with building and maintaining healthy eating habits, often due to a lack of motivation, self-discipline, or busy lifestyle. We redesigned Fitbit to maintain a consistent healthy diet with the concept of the user’s future self.
Design Concept
The "Future Self" is basically an AI that represents the user's desired future. The "Future Self" constantly communicates with the current user, encouraging and supporting to maintain healthy habits and achieve their goals.
I inspired this idea from time-slip movies and the futuristic characteristics of humans. The dialogue format capitalizes on the sense of obligation and pressure to respond to messages, transforming it into motivation. By creating and interacting with a future avatar, users are expected to experience the immersion of conversation.
Prototype 01
Creae your futureself
When signing up, the user can design their future self. From approximate height and weight to specific body shapes, creating the future self serves as a metaphor for the user's future goals. By creating a future avatar, the user can envision and visualize their future.
Prototype 02
Talk with your futureself
After setting the appearance and goals of their future, the user will start conversation with the future self. The future self initiates conversations around meal times, prompting users to input what they have eaten or plan to eat. User research showed that it is inconvenient to input data manually and continuously. However, I expect that inputting data through conversation, as if talking to a friend, would reduce the burden of data entry
Prototype 03
Add meal data
The user can either add meal data from a given list of foods or create their own list to add. When sharing meals with friends or family, the user can also set the number of people eating together to clearly distinguish what and how much they ate, allowing to track more diverse eating contexts and habits.
prototypes 04
Receive a reward
After completing the data entry, the user receive a reward that can be used to access special recipes that support healthy eating habits. This follows the reinforcement theory, which can strengthen users' positive habits.
Are you interested in the project?
The following sections cover the entire process of the project
Behavior Change Model
Reinforcement Theory
Reinforcement theory suggests that behaviors are influenced by the consequences that follow them. Positive reinforcement, such as rewards, can encourage desired behaviors, while negative reinforcement can discourage undesired behaviors. In the context of food tracking, positive and negative reinforcement would motivate significant behavior change in users’ habit formation and maintenance.
Positive Reinforcement
Positive Behavior followed by Positive Consequences
Example
By getting reward, users will be more motivated to eat healthy food regularaly.
Positive Behavior
Eat healthy food regularly
Positive Consequence
Get reward
Negative Reinforcement
Positive Behavior followed by removal of Negative Consequences
Example
If meal data doesn't need to be entered manually, users can enter the data regularly.
Positive Behavior
Enter data regularly
Negative Consequence
Enter data manually
Punishment
Negative Behavior followed by Negative Consequences
Example
If entering the data is skipped, the users may lose reward
Negative Behavior
Skip entering the data
Negative Consequence
Lose reward
Extinction
Negative Behavior followed by removal of Positive Consequences
Example
If the users ignore the instruction for healthy diet, they will have unbalanced diet.
Negative Behavior
Have unbalanced diet
Positive Consequence
Follow the instruction
Competitive analysis
MyFitnessPal
- This app helps users track daily food intake and exercise to achieve their fitness goals.
- It offers users daily calorie and nutrient recommendations based on their physical conditions and objectives.
- Given calories are deducted from the total recommended calories per day, representing how many calories are excessive or lack.
- Users can identify which nutrients are needed to gain specific health goals.
- Users can log meal data from the data library. even if they don’t know how many calories the food has, and which nutrients it contains.
- Users can also log meal data by scanning barcode on the food package, which connects directly to the app.
- Plans could encourage users to achieve specific health goals through 28 days.
Healthify Me
- It’s a connected fitness ecosystem to improve users’ health holistically, more consistently and experience change like never before.
- This app collects all the information from the user at the landing page itself
- It asks user in what period of time they want to achieve that goal
- Different types of reminders for different activities can be discarded because notifications can be annoying
- Free personalized chat for consultation: Response time was pretty quick, it also got a message and call for getting started with goals
- Personalized food search and amount of intake is properly organized
- Data given depending on target you want to achieve and calorie intake
- Personalized food recipe search depending on the ethnicity or culture of the user
User Research
We categorized the insights from user interviews into following themes to figure out design opportunities.
Key Insights
Manually recording data could be a hassle for users.
Making benefits visible or tangible is a key to motivate users.
Healthy diet should consider user preferences.
Involvement of friends or community
Scheduling, time management and efficiency are crucial for those who have flexible or irregular schedule.
Keeping a food data helps users: maintain healthy habits, achieve aesthetic goals
The way of recording data needs to be applied differently depending on the eating context (eating out, cooking for oneself, etc)
User Test
Takeaways
Creating an Avatar
Creating avatar before based on details of user to look a like and add details to achieve goals and it will provide a “Future You” avatar with AI assistant tochat. Details include such as Height, Weight, Body Shape
Meal Data
Entering in the existing meal plan or creating a personalized meal plan by scanning the item with the help of an AI tool.
- Can add meal from chat page directly
- Edit previous plan
- Scan the food and directly add into the system
Reward
Offer a reward for each time the user records their food data or achieve some milestone to access premium features.
- Continuous tracking of diet include positive praise and reward for every successful entry
Nagging
Use of slightly negative language as a means to motivate users in case theygo off-track with their diet tracking routine
- Nagging as a form of negative reinforcement works as long as the language is chosen carefully.
- There is a fine line between nagging being motivating and annoying / insulting. We will investigate that as our future scope.
Reflection
Further research and ideas are required on positive and negative reinforcement in behavior change models. We used rewards and nagging notifications for positive and negative reinforcement, but some usability testing participants questioned whether these would be sufficiently motivating. This feedback suggests a need to explore more effective means of reinforcing and changing user behavior.
I suggested the core concept of this project, conversation between the future self and the present user. It's impressive how the concept and features used in other fields (such as SF movies and messaging apps) were inspired and introduced for dietary management."
