From the start of our capstone experience, we knew that we wanted to focus on wellness. As seniors, we had heard countless stories of the trials that college students face in trying to live authentically and joyfully, and we hoped to create something that would make caring for oneself easier and more enjoyable. Very quickly, we focused on the relationship that young people have with food.
After all, what need is more universal than eating?
We quickly jumped into interviews, hoping to see what needs around food existed for young people and beyond. We quickly discovered a few need areas: access to resources, community and culture, and food as nourishment. Early on, we decided to frame our goal product as the following: food education, as designed for community-oriented systems with an emphasis on body neutrality.
Overall, we heard again and again that, confirming our assumptions, people, especially young people, have very tempestuous relationships with food. Regardless of the final form of our product, we wanted to above all empower students to make informed and joyful food choices.
A key insight that we heard of during our interviewing process was the concept of the three pillars of health, which are all required to have a healthy lifestyle: physical, social, and emotional. We liked this so much that we built our first prototypes around it!
For our first round of prototypes, we focused on three approaches all inspired by the previously mentioned three pillars. To promote emotional awareness in regards to food, we designed an app meant to help users check in with themselves about their relationship to food and general wellbeing (top left). To tackle (mis)information, we considered an educational model to be included in Stanford's required New Student Orientation (top right). Finally, we designed a combination of cards and an app system meant for school dining hall systems meant to reduce the effort needed by students to make food choices (bottom).
After conducting another round of interviews as well as receiving feedback from jurors within our program, we decided to pursue our dining hall system. Not only did this direction seem most viable and relevant to our need space, but we were most excited about this one, and we like to trust our gut when we can afford to. As such, we redefined our target demographic to be Stanford students, in an effort to deeply understand the existing dining hall information system and why it wasn't working for students.
With our new direction of dining hall spaces, we created more detailed versions of our app and cards, focusing specifically on ways of visualizing health information. Central to our vision for the dining hall system, we wanted to communicate nutritional information as intuitively as possible to students, who have very little time to read whilst making food choices, but more importantly, do so in a way that stresses what foods can do for you (strengthen bones, improve eyesight, etc.) instead of to you (cause weight loss or gain). We experimented with a few different card and app visualizations, and ultimately came down to a dilemma: do we want to create a tool that feels familiar/intuitive to users or do we want to create a mindset shift?
Although we eventually found that we could (spoiler alert) do both, we ultimately decided to prioritize mindset shifts over extremely familiar visuals. As such, we included the whole body model (top middle and bottom right) as our primary means of visualizing the nutrition information of the foods that student chooses to eat. The app was designed to both provide information on the benefits of students' favorite dishes, as well as act as a more convenient online menu for dining halls across campus. We also included goal-setting within our app, as we hoped to help students choose and work towards health goals so that they could more easily do so beyond college.
After communicating with Stanford's Residential and Dining Enterprises (R&DE) for some time, we were finally cleared to officially test our prototypes within dining halls (though we had run a number of informal user tests along the way). We refined our prototypes, especially our cards, in order to increase readability and focus on health benefits, and then set up within Flo-mo (Florence-Moore) Dining with printed cards at each main dish, flyers for online feedback, and a table to speak with student diners.
After a few hours of conversations, we came away with the following feedback:
Thankfully, students really enjoyed the functionality of both our cards and app and felt that they would have used them especially during their freshman year.
They enjoyed and prioritized easy to digest and visually appealing information, with nearly unanimous approval of our cards but mixed feelings about our app, especially the body visualization.
Taking students' stated importance of aesthetics to heart, we did a complete visual overhaul of our app design, and therefore making the transition between our cards and app feel as seamless as possible.
Central to our redesign was our method of visualizing progress towards health goals - as students had responded best to plate and graph-like models best, we decided to combine both into a circular progress indicator that provided a comparable feeling of wholeness to ensure that reaching goals felt as satisfying as possible. In doing so, we made our health goal aesthetics more central to the app, redefining our color scheme and shapes to be in line with our card designs. And for our cards, we cleaned up our designs, standardizing images and introducing a rainbow-ordered visual hierarchy.
To see our final product, go to Our Product tab or click here!