Lettuce Health

Struggle with maintaining a diet? Well luckily, you don’t have to. With the meal planning app, Lettuce Health, you can have a personalized meal plan based on restaurants near you.

Created during a design hackathon using Figma

The Prompt

I joined a hackathon aiming to address the problem of “sustainability”. Now, the first idea that might come to mind is environmental sustainability (not least because of the photo to the left). However, the hackathon was concerned with sustainability in the general sense — if you could make a case that it had to do with sustainability, you could base your project on it.

Our group’s problem was: “How might we help sustain a person’s motivation to exercise, rest, and diet for someone who wants to get and stay at their desired fitness level?”. Health is so often sidelined for one’s career and hedonistic pursuits. Especially as young professionals without families or many other commitments, we wanted to make sure that we would be able to stay healthy as the years progressed.

While we initially focused on exercise, we ran into problems halfway through the hackathon (more on this in Personas and Interviews). I suggested we pivot to diet, as we weren’t getting anywhere with exercise.

Personas and Interviews

When first coming up with a persona, we posited that middle-aged office workers would have the most problem with maintaining their fitness goals. However, there was one issue. As we were making a persona map of our model office worker, we realized that many of the problems revolved around not having enough time.

*Our persona map for the average middle-aged office worker in Hong Kong*

I conducted some interviews with friends that were miraculously available during the hackathon. I asked them about their exercise habits, but I felt as though I also asked leading questions. For example, we had a hunch that gym buddies would help users with both motivation and confidence issues. When I talked to my friends, I asked if they enjoyed working out more with a gym buddy. I believe this might be because I felt pressured to provide some validity to our hypothesis so that we could progress to the next step and not have to backtrack. In retrospect, I also believe the hackathon 3-day schedule makes it highly disadvantageous for people to truly experiment and fail. Any setbacks could be highly disastrous for us and it resulted in a sunk cost fallacy mindset.

*Photo by* *ThisisEngineering RAEng* on *Unsplash*

While some of the problems focused on problems like confidence and laziness, we believed a significant factor was time. Since our office workers were in Hong Kong, the issue of time was even more severe. Unfortunately, there aren’t many ways to create more time. Yes, there’s HIIT (high-intensity interval training, which tends to be quite short), but creating more time is the eternal problem that has still yet to be solved.

Ideation

Our group ideated a variety of ideas to combat some of the other problems like laziness and lack of confidence. I used an ideation game I created to help with the brainstorming. For example, one of the solutions we ideated was having an app to find gym buddies. Gym buddies would help motivate people to work out and could also help boost confidence.

Unfortunately, try as we might, we weren’t able to come up with anything satisfactory. Halfway through the hackathon we decided to pivot to helping office workers sustain a healthy diet. We did another round of brainstorming and came up with an app that would give office workers a meal plan based on restaurants around them.

We fleshed out our persona a bit more on the diet side. Through a combination of secondary research and anecdotal experiences we were able to construct a persona for our office worker who was looking to make healthier food choices. These office workers had trouble starting diets cold turkey. In addition, even when they were fully integrated into their diet, they would benefit from having a cheat day or meal every so often so that they had something to look forward to.

*Our brainstorming session with my ideation game!*

Prototyping

We split the prototyping between the group. We all did the wireframing and visual design, however, one of the group members did another pass through some of the screens to align them visually with the rest of the app. I was in charge of the meal screen as well as the weekly view of the meal plan (below), although that was retouched.

*Tells user what they’re having that day*

The main priorities for prototyping were what data we would collect and utilize, as well as how our users would interact with the meal planning part of the app. Some features we felt were quite crucial included:

Allowing users to swap out meals they didn’t like
- While we did want our users to stick to the meal plan, we didn’t need to force them to eat things they didn’t like. Allowing them to shuffle food meant that they could find something they liked that fit into their macros
Switch meals around
- Just in case they wanted to have something on a different day. In addition, this meant that they could move around their cheat meals to days they wanted them. This is especially important because we would want the user to be as satisfied with the cheat meal as possible so that they didn’t crave it too much after
Delete meals for days they didn’t need the app for
- Sometimes people bring lunch from home or already have plans
Inviting other Lettuce Health users so that the app could find a restaurant that fits everyone’s needs
- Lots of people in Hong Kong eat together for lunch. If Lettuce Health users tried to eat together without being able to form a group it would likely be a logistical nightmare unless they all had similar nutritional needs. This feature would find a restaurant with dishes that could fulfill everyone’s macros
Telling users the nutritional info of the food they were eating
- Not entirely necessary, however for people who want to track their macros it would be
How to get to the restaurant
- Users might need help getting to the restaurant if its new and we don’t want to ruin their app experience by making them go to another app

Unfortunately, since we didn’t have a lot of time left at the end of the hackathon we didn’t create a whole start to end user journey. We were able to prototype the main interactions though, which included how the user navigates from the weekly menu to the specific meal.

Conclusion

After the final presentation, the judges awarded us second place. While I thought the app was an interesting idea, I think there were some things we could improve on. Some of these problems were due to the time constraints of the hackathon. For example, I think we could be faster with pivoting. In general, I think having an instinct for when an idea just isn’t going to work out is good, but in this case, specifically, I feel as though we could have used more time to either flesh out our original idea or do more research.

Personally, I believe my visual design could improve. Not only in terms of creating sleek-looking designs but at the very least aligning with existing visual identities. In addition, my user research methodology would be improved if I didn’t ask as many leading questions. While the intention to be impartial is there, it turns out that I actually need to be conscious about how I’m asking questions (and I suspect many people need to as well).