Sam is a mobile application founded by three dietitians that seek to bring a nutritional solution to users with chronic illnesses such as high blood pressure and diabetes. Sam offers these users a custom meal plan, recipes, and education built around the user’s specific condition, preferences, and goals.
Sam was a true ground-up project for me, we started with only general ideas and patient feedback. I was responsible for the branding, wireframing, UI design and prototyping for the project. More specifically, this work included:
Sam was founded to meet a specific need that three dietitians identified in their field. These needs were among people with chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. We sought to deliver value for Sam but focusing on these foundations:
Make health and health education more accessible. Many patients that took part in user research had a lack of access to resources and knowledge when it came to health and diet. Sam seeks to bridge this disconnect by offering a low cost to free solution that sets users up with a meal plan customized to their specific needs, and offers education specific to the user’s condition.
Focus on flexibility. Understanding what Sam means and how it fits into a user’s life is imperative for success for us as we aim to make sam robust in what it offers, yet flexible enough knowing that users will deviate from their meal plan from time to time.
Personalization is what it's all about. Sam is serving users with truly unique needs. In order to offer something that addresses these needs in a real way, we will need to focus on the users themselves and understand how this solution fits into their lives. By building around this understanding, we will take steps to meet these unique needs.
Sam at its core is about its users and delivering a personalized meal plan based on who they are and their specific needs. So our first stop was delving into the research to paint a picture of who these people actually are, along with their pain points, goals, and expectations.
Following our research and discovery, we wanted to align around what we are building and offering in order to stay focused on where we are delivering value. Our problem statement is the culmination of everything we have learned thus far on the project and will inform how we move forward.
Users with chronic conditions often struggle to find a comprehensive solution in order to obtain the tools and knowledge to manage their diet and health. This stems from a lack of access to resources and a lack of understanding about health and diet overall. In addition to this, a diet proves to be challenging to stick to when the user must create and manage it themselves.
In order to build the right thing, we utilized both the user research and discovery to work alongside the client to uncover and identify the right features to build.
The main focus was placed on the core user needs such as personalized meal plans and a recipe database. However, other valuable functionality was identified in this stage that will be essential for users in the context of supporting daily, habitual use.
Once we had the core functionality of sam defined, we began designing the app structure and the user flows that will comprise it.
The goal of the user flows was to keep things as simple and consistent as possible. For example, when swapping a meal from the recipes instead of the home screen the flows should stay as similar to one another as possible in order to reduce confusion.
This stage delivered value for both our team and for our client, as we made tough decisions and aligned around abstract ideas in a concrete way. Doing so at an early and low fidelity stage made iteration easy and encouraged.
In the wireframing stage, our app began to really take shape. Our main goal in this stage was to map out the majority of our screens, flows, and functionality in order to align internally and externally to ensure we have clarity moving into UI design.
Through a collaborative wireframing process, we now have the majority of our flow and functionality decisions defined and set. This allows us to now primarily focus on UI and visual design. Our goals for the UI were as follows:
Design with our users in mind first. Our users tend to be older and suffer from a variety of health conditions. With this in mind, we designed the UI taking size, contrast, color, and other accessibility factors into consideration. This will be an ongoing process, as we plan to evaluate our accessibility specifically in user testing.
Carry the core brand principles over to the UI. The core foundations of the Sam brand are clean, personalized, fresh, simple, and approachable. We want to keep these ideas in tact as we are creating the UI and visual design.
Keep the UI simple and uncluttered. This is something that every UI should seek to achieve, but we want to emphasize this keeping our users and use cases in mind. We want to keep everything easy to understand, easy to read, and ultimately easy to make a habit of.
Following the creation and approval of the screens, interactivity and animation were added to many of the flows in order to illustrate the design in more depth for the client and developers.
The Sam app is now in development. For me, this means design support and collaboration with development, as well as planning out future user and beta testing. Stay tuned for more updates as sam progresses and prepares to launch!
