1. Needs Finding Report
1.1. Target Audience
We targeted people who are anywhere between the ages 18 - 35. The people who:
are diet conscious
are carbs/ sugar conscious
want to improve their mental health
want to monitor their caffeine intake
1.2. Study Participants
Note: Each interview participant's name has been kept anonymous. We have used our team members' initials to denote which participant was interviewed by who.
KB1
A 22 year old university student who tries to stay active by doing yoga and exercise, who wants to work on improving their lifestyle just a bit by changing their eating habits. They are already on the path for clean eating but can’t maintain the habit. Moreover, they want to learn how to cook food in order to eat clean. Currently facing many mental issues and think that improving these habits will help not only physically but also mentally.
KB2
A 24 year old bachelors student who is very lazy. Doesn’t like to get up and do things. Can eat whatever they want and is addicted to desserts. They want to improve their habits by starting exercise and avoiding sweets. They are aware that these habits are affecting their health but do not get enough motivation to follow through. Thinks that food is an important aspect of life, but doesn’t know if it's impacting their mental health or not.
RS1
A 27 year old, who works at a software house and spends a lot of time working online. Tries to maintain a good eating routine but ends up skipping meals when busy with work. They think that taking timely meals, a balanced diet and drinking more water is how they can improve their eating habits. They do not exercise and think a restricted diet is way better than going to the gym. They also acknowledge how their mood swings are affected when they are not eating properly.
RS2
A 22 year old, university going student. Appears satisfied with their current eating habits. They have a good eating routine and have not really experienced any stress eating or starving. Nor do they think that their eating habits have any effect on their mood swings. They believe that their mood swings are more affected by their circumstances.
RS3
A 23 year old, university going student who also works as a freelancer. Not a regular on meals. They believe that taking timely meals would help improve their eating habits. For them it's hard to have a proper diet plan because it takes a lot of their time. They have experienced stress eating and have struggled with weight gain as well.
MZ1
A 24 year old, who works at an IT firm. They regularly go to the gym and are particular about their diet. Had a problem with weight in high school, which is why they have been religiously keeping up with their regime. Have their bad days where due to stress or unavoidable circumstances they have to go astray from their almost perfect lifestyle with respect to diet and exercise.
MZ2
A 22 year old graduate who lives in a hostel and has a job. Not able to pay attention to their health due to busy schedule. They aren't able to make time for the gym and because they are away from home, they only eat junk or fast food due to which they are suffering from losing and maintaining weight. Aware about the importance of food, exercise and its impact on the physical and mental health but unable to do something about it because of the routine.
MA1
A 22 year old university student who lives with their family and spends most of their time outside the house. Not too strict with their diet, MA1 loves to eat outside and has a severe sweet tooth. Fries are their favorite. They are well aware of the bad effects of their diet but it’s really difficult to change habits. “Stress eating is a necessary evil.”
MA2
Another 22 year old undergrad student who lives with their family. Loves to workout and is super energetic. Balancing out everything to the best of their ability, MA2 realizes the importance of therapy and staying healthy. Recently though, they have been experiencing unexplainable periods of low motivations and mood.
1.3. Findings
After conducting the interviews, doing affinity walls and making empathy maps as well as personas, we have come to the conclusion that people are willing to change their habits if it makes them mentally and physically healthy. But currently they are not much aware of how their habits, be it eating or exercising, are affecting them.
What we have come to know after everything is that most of the users, if not all, are addicted to something and that something is most caffeine and/or dessert. Whenever they crave it but don’t get it, they feel angry, agitated and frustrated.
Most of them also experience mood swings but are unable to identify the origins of why they are facing the issue and so they categorize it into a normal feeling which shouldn’t be paid much attention to.
Stress eating was a common theme throughout the study and most of them felt guilty doing so.
Their goal is to have a happy and healthy lifestyle. However, they feel that following diet plans is very tough as it not only restricts the food but it's also difficult to find ingredients and time to cook.
From the research we found out that people are lacking motivation. They are unable to follow good eating habits, diet plans and active routines. They want something that can help them become consistent with these good habits.
Moreover, we have also realized that people need something that can visually show them how the food is impacting them because it puts a better perspective on the effects of these things on an individual.
They also want easy to follow recipes which have readily available ingredients that are affordable to help them maintain healthy eating habits because buying healthy food is expensive and most online recipes have ingredients that either have so many calories or they don’t have substitutes available in the market.
1.4. Implications
Our initial idea was creating awareness about how people's food consumption affects their behavior and how they might be able to improve their habits. After the needs-finding research we have come across quite interesting and vast new requirements and constraints.
Most problems for people revolve around sweets and caffeine. People might be more conscious about these because of how well these substances are known to have negative effects. Even if they indirectly admitted to regularly consuming these substances and affecting their health negatively, they were defensive when they talked about them as their addictions. So we need to address this issue in a way that doesn’t annoy the user.
Water consumption is something all interviewees wanted to increase and were willing to work on. They expressed how they forget to drink enough water and reminders would be helpful.
Visualization and gamification of growth turned out to be a common want for people in both informal and formal interviews. So we could possibly work on a gamified solution or simply work on visualization of growth and motivating users using before and after comparisons of their avatar.
It’s not surprising that people get annoyed by having to log in details about their day. They were also conscious about their screen time. Those who used self-improvement apps disliked how good features of the app were paid. These issues made the interviewees stop using the app.
They are unable to follow good eating habits, diet plans and active routines. They want something that can help them stick to those routines. Most interviewees agreed that having small achievable milestones and some incentives to achieve them would be helpful.
Keeping this in mind, we could possibly add some kind of a reward system that will give them the motivation to fulfill their goals and stick to the app. The reward system concept is something used by social media apps and games to keep users coming back for their dopamine.
1.5. Affinity Mapping to Reach these Conclusions
Beginning of the mapping
End of the Affinity mapping
2. Empathy maps & personas
2.1 Empathy maps of the interviews
2.2. Personas
2.2.1 Persona 1
Name:
Khadija
Age:
23
Education:
Bachelor’s Degree
Birthplace:
Karachi, Pakistan
Family:
Parents
Occupation:
To study, eat and sleep
“Unhealthy is not the food but the time and quantity”
Goals
Become more active and take care of diet and exercise.
Frustrations
Doesn’t have the motivation to be active or improve the diet. Even when she tries to improve she doesn't know how to start or what steps to take.
Story
Khadija is a 23 year old university student, who spends most of her day laying in bed either doing her assignments or watching Netflix. She wants to change her habits but doesn’t want to work for it. She knows eating unhealthy is bad for her but that is why she does it and this is how she copes.
2.2.2 Persona 2
Name:
Johnny boi
Age:
23
Education:
Bachelor’s Degree
Birthplace:
Karachi, Pakistan
Family:
No family, unmarried
Occupation:
Student
“Health is wealth and I wanna be really wealthy!”
Goals
He has a healthy lifestyle but he wants to be better. He knows there’s room for improvement.
Frustrations
While he thinks that being active is in his hands, he also believes that while living alone, he doesn't have the opportunity to keep his eating habits healthy as it's difficult to cook and expensive to buy food that is beneficial to health. He would love cooking something but ingredients are hard to find!
Story
Johnny wasn’t always the gym freak he is today. His hard work has boosted his confidence and he loves talking about his healthy habits. Mornings are for university and evenings are for the gym. His energy is unmatched!
2.2.3 Persona 3
Name:
Rabbia
Age:
27
Education:
Masters
Birthplace:
Islamabad, Pakistan
Family:
Parents
Occupation:
Software Engineer
“What food?”
“Not food, not water, only air to stay alive”
Goals
To have a more balanced diet and timely meals.
Frustrations
Work routine is so hectic that she does not have timely meals.
Story
Rabbia is a 27-year old, working woman. She’s a workaholic and can not sit idle for long. She immerses herself into her work so much that she does not get time to have healthy eating habits or an active lifestyle. When she gets busy at work, she ends up skipping her meals. She doesn’t go to the gym as it takes too much of her time.
3. Reflection on Bias
We conducted interviews with 9 individuals; thus, we can assert our sample size was substantial. The discoveries that seem to divert us from the initial method instill confidence that we are following the appropriate path.
Rabbia
For some questions, I noticed that I framed the questions with examples in such a way that the participants ended up repeating what I said to them. I felt like they had this idea of giving the ‘correct’ answer, and did not come up with their own problem. Secondly, when I used the word “addiction”, my first participant got a little defensive. So for the next two interviews, I tried to clearly state that “I know that addiction is a very strong word, I simply mean something you can not go without having, you may categorize into low-level, mild, strong.”
Khadija
I think because of how I knew my participants beforehand it made me create assumptions about them among which some of them were true and some not. So to avoid those assumptions from impacting my study, I tried to stay focused on what they said and tried to take notes from what they said as well as observations I made and not add anything which I knew about them from before.
Muhid
I made sure to remove any confirmation bias by having a clear head during the whole process and not keeping any assumptions for my interviewees. The questions were designed to minimize false-consensus bias as much as possible by asking things that we thought we already knew. I also made sure to note down everything during the interview and reviewed it so as to have each point of the interview at equal relevance. I was aware of my assumptions throughout, and tried my best to keep them aside.
Appendix
Team Dynamics
Muhid Abid: Conducted 2 Interviews, affinity mapping, individual empathy maps, 1 persona and worked on implications
Rabbia Sajjad: Conducted 2 Interviews, affinity mapping, individual empathy maps, 1 persona and worked on findings
Khadija Bashir: Conducted 3 Interviews, affinity mapping, individual empathy maps, aggregated empathy maps and 1 persona
Maryam Zaheer: Conducted 2 Interviews, affinity mapping, individual empathy maps