Safe Appetite
Safe Appetite is a mobile app designed to address a common and serious problem: the uncertainty and anxiety experienced by people living with allergies, intolerances, or dietary restrictions when trying a new product or food for the first time. The app helps users quickly and easily identify ingredients they need to avoid in foods, cosmetics, and medicines, using barcode scanning as its core feature.
Take control of what you consume with just one click
My role at Safe Appetite:
This was my first project as a UX designer, developed while I was working two full-time jobs and attending in-person classes to enhance my skills. I was the sole designer on the project, so all of the work presented below was carried out entirely by me — from research to final prototype.
The problem:
The potential problem came from the perception that people who lives with restrictive diets, especially those with food allergies and intolerances, feel insecure and frustrated when shopping for food due to the lack of nutritional information available or the absence of clarity on food product labels when shopping for groceries, resulting in a feeling of fear and lack of belonging of these individuals in food establishments.
The Design Process:
The Design process was based on the Double Diamond method. This process was used to separate the project into 4 distinct stages, namely: Discovering the environment in which the project finds itself, as well as analysing possible existing “pains”, Defining which problems will be the focus of the project, Developing possible solutions and Deliver the final product with a high-fidelity prototype.
Discover - Research
In this first step, to better understand the scenario I consulted research collecting data from reliable sources to understand and add contexts to my questions. Then, quantitative research took the lead and aimed to validate the assumptions and doubts raised, in addition to confirming the problem as a real pain felt by people with food hypersensitivity. A total of 7 users were interviewed.
Key findings:
Those with allergies are well adept to isolation since their quality of life is adversely affected by anxiety and uncertainty as a significant proportion of food-induced allergic reactions occur often due to insufficient information available.
In most cases, the fear of an allergic reaction extends beyond food products to other products such as medicines.
Topical allergies are also a concern, as cosmetics may contain an allergen that can cause problems if it comes into contact with the skin.
When shopping, the scene gets a little chaotic, it takes time to read and research the product ingredients on their labels and employees are almost always unable to answer questions about allergies, taking into account the number of products present in a cosmetics shop or in a market, for example.
At this point in the research I understood that, in addition to the concerns of our potential users, our application also needed to be more comprehensive and go beyond just food products, we needed Safe Appetite to be able to be used on any and all products that contain a barcode.
After that, I delved deeper into the next step and one of the most important in the process of building a useful, easy-to-use tool that would stood out from the others already available on the market for our users. The Competitor analysis with at least 5 competitors.
Competitor Analysis
Define - Personas
User Stories
Let’s use Mary Ellen as our primary persona from here. She, as a student with allergies, would like to have a faster option to check the ingredients on food labels, so that she can save time when shopping for groceries
Problem Statement & hypothesis
Mary Ellen, an allergic person, needs a faster way to visualize all the ingredients contained in a food product because she wants to save time when buying food.
We believe that building a tool with an ingredients search function that will read the food labels for Mary Ellen we will reduce the time she spends evaluating each ingredient for an allergen. We will know this to be true when we see her good review after using it
Develop - User flow & site map
First access flow
Flow to read bar codes
Site Map
Digital Wireframes.
Functionalities
The app's main screen features an intuitive, user-friendly design that provides access to informative readings and features to assist users on a day-to-day basis, reinforcing content aimed at guiding and supporting Safe Appetite users.
Homepage
Users will use this feature to scan the barcode of products they intend to consume. Information such as the ingredients present in the product is provided, along with a message highlighting how safe the product is based on their allergies, intolerances, or preferences previously entered in the app.
Scanner
The search results will be saved in the user's history, allowing them to view previously scanned products whenever needed.
Scanner results
The user will have the ability to create a shopping list with products that do not pose a risk to their health. They can add items to their shopping list either by scanning products themselves or by searching for a specific product using the search bar.
Shopping List
A feature to assist the user when visiting a location where the language is foreign and unfamiliar. The user will be able to use it in any food establishment by translating cards with pre-written messages, which can be edited and adjusted as needed to suit the user's specific requirements.
Travel Cards
The app also provides informative readings, such as the first steps to take when encountering an allergic reaction, along with first aid guidance and emergency contact numbers.
Emergency Advice
Refinement & Development
Some time after the initial designs were created, it was decided by my stakeholder that Safe Appetite would no longer be a mobile app, but a web application. As a result, I believe we should return to the initial stages of the design process. This would involve reviewing what has already been done, determining what can be retained, and identifying what needs to be discarded.
I would like to conduct interviews to better understand which features hold monetary value for customers and which pricing model they would prefer. This will help ensure that the user remains at the heart of the decision-making process.
I would like to further refine the design of the application while maintaining a friendly and welcoming atmosphere, as our target audience encompasses people of all ages.
I also designed a website for Safe Appetite for marketing purposes, to allow users to become familiar with our product and its features before its official launch. I would also like to refine the design of the website.
Next Steps…
The ideal course of action now would be to conduct more user interviews, prioritising usability testing. This will enable us to begin making necessary adjustments to the design and usability of the app.
Reflection.
I fully immersed myself in this project, determined not to produce amateur-looking designs I pushed myself to deliver something that met all of my client’s expectations, including those she didn’t yet know she had. I finished this project with great care, and ideas were constantly blossoming in my mind. However, I learned that this is part of a designer’s life — a project is never truly 100% finished, as we always strive for more.
This was my first project as a UX designer. I was initially guided by incredible designers during my time at Experience Haus, but later I had to proceed on my own. Many changes were made from the initial brief I received to the final result presented in this case study. I'd be happy to share more about the project and its journey with anyone interested.