Salt Tracker
Overview
Salt tracker is an app designed for salt tracking and reduction in daily life. According to WHO, an estimated 2.5 million deaths could be prevented by salt reduction. However, it is not an easy task to do in daily life. The challenge and goal is to help user form a habit they do not have beforehand.
Duration
May 2019 - September 2019
Category
UX design
UI design
service design
UX tools
user journey map
usability testing
design iteration
Background
Salt overtake has become a global health challenge that we have to tackle. On average, American eat more than 3,400 millgrams of sodium each day, more than two times of the American Heart Organization has recommended (1,500 mgs). Children are also consuming salt far more than they should.
“An estimated 2.5 million deaths could be prevented each year if global salt consumption were reduced to the recommended level.”
Where are salt from?
77% of American salt intake comes from processed food, which includes bread, pizza, cold cuts and bacon, cheese, soups, fast foods, and prepared dinners, such as pasta, meat, and egg dishes. Only 18% comes from the table.
So the challenge
How can we help users to track and control salt intake thus to form a helthy salt-reduced diet?
Research
Secondary research
To understand the question and challenge better, I did a quick research on the internet. But the first question we have to address is “is it possilble to control salt intake?” Luckily, the answear is yes.
Reverse craving salt
How To Read Nutrition Label?
Since 77% of salt comes from packaged food, it is important to read and compare nutrition fact label. Actually, multiple health organizations including American Heart Organization consider this as a effective way to salt smartly.
Primary Research: Survey
In order to understand this question from a quantitive perspective, I conducted a survey through an online platform “wenjuanxing“. This survey has 72 participants; most of them are young aged and have a high degree.
Key Takeways
There is a huge cognition gap between how much salt people think they eat and they actually eat. More than 85% believe they have a moderate or less salt intake. While more than 9 of 10 Chinese people eat double salt of recommendation.
46% controls salt intake. But the results seem ineffective.
Salt reduction still needs public promotion. 43% will try to control salt by simply informing them 2 plain facts.
Primary research: Interview
I conducted 4 one-on-one in-depth interviews with 1 working mom, 3 unmaried people. Because of the importance of salt-reduced healthy diet for a kid, I decided to interview a parent who cook for the kid. The working mom I talked with is 39 years old. She has a lovely 3-year-old daughter. She told me she was extremely health-consious when preparing food for the whole family especially for her daughter. And she is the only one I talked with that really read the nutrition facts and would compare sodium index between equivalent food.
All of the other 3 interviewees are young and either student or just step into the society. Here are the key questions and answears of the interviews.
Ideation
Persona & User Journey Map
From research especially interview, I was able to generalized a typical user and a journey that this user would go through during whole process. A typical user would be a mom cooking for the whole family. By scutinizing the journey the user takes, I was trying to unveil their doing, thinking and feeling to identify specific design opportunities.
Based on opportunities extracted from user journey map, I focus my design mainly on the following 5 features or : easy-to-access food information, low salt recipe, keep kid in mind, statistics visualization and making tracking a habit.
User flow
An app is a perfect option for matching those 5 design focuses listed above. So I decided to design an app to address this problem. Here is the user flow when using app as well as some key features of this app. As the picture shows, every focus is presented by a symbol. A specific procedure marked by these symbols means it can solve this issue or achieve this goal.
Wireframing
Usability Testing & quick iteration
In order to make my final design as valid as possible, I conducted a few usability testing with volunteers. Luckily, my first version of the wireframe was considered effective and easy to understand. Still, there’s a few small bugs need to fix. So I made some small changes and iterated a little bit.
Final design
Prototype
In this app, I designed 4 main pages as indicated in the navigation bar: daily, stat (statistics), recipe and profile. Besides, I saw logging salt intake for every meal or snack as the most important part of this app. It should be quick and accessible. Thus I designed a main button overlapping the navigation bar which user can access in all the 4 pages. Also, it is designed as a call to action (CTA) button to help forming the logging and tracking habit.
Daily: this is the dashboard page for showing current salt intake. Data is designed to be intuitive and understandable. The salt shake and salt “mountain” indicate how much salt left you can consume today and how much salt you’ve already consumed respetively. User can also log a specific meal such as lunch in only one step.
Stat: the design goal of this page lies two ways. One is designing a understandable-in-a-glance chart. To achive this, I choosed bar chart for better comparison between days and 4 colors to represent 4 meals. In this way, user can have a better sense of what they consume and encourage a more favorable action. The second is to make every log of salt intake easy to see, find and edit. I used triangle bar to showcase every log which contains essential information such as time, salt quantity and type of meal.
Recipe: this page is relatively simple. Simply keep it easy to navigate will be fine.
log salt intake: the key is to allow user to complete this action step by step so they don’t get overwhelmed. I used animations to make those steps more coherent and responsive. Once the log is finished, another animation in which the salt shake shakes and salt drops will be showed to user.
Animation
To make the prototype more vivid, I made a few animations for main features.
Quick access to log meal
do no miss a single meal
Track for
the whole family
dashboard for all family members
log salt intake
Intuitive and fun
Statistic and log history
Information made easy
Use Scenario
NFC tag is cheap and easy to get. Thus, we propose that every food company should stick one to every product they make, just like the nutrition label. It should be a must-have. By having NFC, users can view nutrition facts about the food in just a single tap. We also provide the user with food insights such as is it low-salt and healthy.
