Feast
We enable diabetics to embrace unfamiliar cuisine while caring for their health
/Intelligent nutrition information estimation to allow diabetics to eat out with friends while taking care of their health: alive without compromise
Duration
7 weeks
Team
Megan ,
Role
Design research, UX design
Introduction:
I led design research and UX for “Feast”, a digital prototype of a smartphone app to empower diabetics to eat out while caring properly for their health. In needfinding, we discovered that eating out is hard for diabetics because carbohydrate information for proper insulin dosage is nonexistent, and that diabetics often feel trapped between compromising fun out with friends and their health.
To solve this dilemma, we prototyped “Feast”, an app which resolves the major gaps in calculating insulin and tracking blood trends for young diabetics eating out by using SLAM and sensor data from the user’s smartphone to frictionlessly estimate the type and amount of a given food for proper insulin dosage while the user shares their meal on Instagram.
Feast was designed for a UX design class at Stanford and won most innovative concept in a roundup of over 30? apps produced by that year’s cohort.
Stanford HCI class - cross-disciliniary team with programmer and ? What is Megan?
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I led design research and UX for “Feast”, a digital prototype of a smartphone app to enable type 1 diabetics to eat out and socialize (around food) without compromising their long-term health.
During needfinding, we discovered that most? Type 1 diabetics are diagnosed in their 20’s, a pivotal time for dating and going out. Because restaurants generally can’t provide nutrition facts needed for correct insulin dosage, diabetics eating out are often forced to under-dose insulin and compromise their health, or stay home and feel like a victim.
Our solution involved using a smartphone camera, accelerometer, and GPS to frictionlessly and accurately estimate the amount and type of a given food for proper insulin dosage to empower diabetics to both enjoy life and care for their health.
Feast: “alive without compromise"
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Needfinding and insights
Began project seeking opportunities to design for chronic illness. In our ethnography, we found that chronic illness and personal identity are deeply intertwined:
“I don’t want people to see me as sick, because sick means helpless” - One interviewee speaking about his trip to Southeast Asia trip to defy being limited by diabetes.
Young people especially struggled with finding proper balance in living with a chronic illness- either being too careful with unnecessary restrictions or feeling guilty and ill from having neglected proper care, both of which made them feel unhappy. Some of the most interesting stories came from young recently-diagnosed type 1 diabetics, who were often in denial or would try to underplay their illness:
“I’ll find it when I find it (insulin monitor). Or I’ll let my sugar get really high so it beeps and I can find it” - 15 year old female type 1 diabetic
"I don’t want my illness to take over my life, so I only use my CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitor) when it’s convenient"
We learned that dosing insulin properly to account for food composition, physical activity, and individual metabolism is a complex calculation. If diabetics let blood sugar run too high, they can experience headaches, fatigue, and potentially DKA (diabetic ketoacidosis, which causes long term organ damage). If they let blood sugar run too low, they can unexpectedly lose consciousness and die. Given these outcomes, diabetics choose to dose insulin to err on the side of high blood sugar if faced with unfamiliar food.
(Diabetes is) “The thinking disease”
Accounting for food and exercise in insulin dosage is “kind of fun, like in a twisted way.”
“It was kind of like a cool challenge, but then it just got kind of tiring”
Type 1 diabetics are often diagnosed in their early 20’s, and their social lifestyles often revolve around socializing over food and drinks out (which is a pivotal time for dating and going out. developing identity). This usually involves eating lots of food or drinks for which carbohydrate information isn’t available and has to be roughly estimated.
“I’m kind of adventurous about food, but sometimes say fuck it with my blood. It would be nice to have both.” (Male type 1 diabetic in early 20’s)
One type one diabetic told a story of when he was in college and had gotten drunk. He hadn’t dosed enough insulin experienced DKA, throwing up. He never told his mom about this because he was afraid she would judge him.
Taking this point of view, we refined our project’s “mission” to be to empower diabetes sufferers (especially young type I diabetics) to live boldly without being defined by illness (avoid letting their illness define them) while properly safeguarding their health.
Photos: Mini empathy maps -> big empathy map -> POVs -> how might we's
One POV: We met Patrick, Phil, and Hailey who had chronic illnesses. We were surprised that their resistance to identifying with and being confined by their diseases was often self-defeating. It would be game changing for them to gain a broader perspective of themselves to outgrow the escapism needed to support their current internal identity.
HMW: How might we empower type 1 diabetics to care for their disease while going out without being a victim?
HMW: empower diabetes sufferers to live boldly without being defined by illness while properly safeguarding their health?
The inspiration for the functionality Feast coalesced over several different experience prototypes testing different hypotheses.
We were inspired to design for the poignant need of young social diabetics to track carbohydrate intake while living an active and social lifestyle. While the young type I diabetics are a kind of "extreme user”, this need is felt by all diabetics, and could have broader applications to the health-conscious population.
Feast leverages the celebratory rituals of around the problem as its solution: to take pictures of food and post them on social media. We envisioned using ML image recognition and SLAM techniques to accurately identify foods, estimate their volume, and extrapolate carbohydrate content for the user, all while they are instagramming their food and celebrating life.
By leveraging the celebratory rituals of around the problem as its solution and empower young diabetics to live without compromise. have their cake and health too.
We also incorporated the ability to track historical blood sugar against food intake based on diabetics comments that individual response to foods vary, so we designed a more transparent way to see and understand personal response and trends.
How might we empower type 1 diabetics to care for their disease while going out without being a victim?
We met Patrick, Phil, and Hailey who had chronic illnesses. We were surprised that their resistance to identifying with and being confined by their diseases was often self-defeating.
It would be game changing for them to gain a broader perspective of themselves to outgrow the escapism needed to support their current internal identity.
Initial Prototypes:
Playing with limitations and identity: Blue Apron, Adventure Life
Design Point of View: It would be game changing for them to gain a broader perspective of themselves to outgrow the escapism needed to support their current internal identity.
An early prototype inspired by the perceived and real limitations people with chronic illnesses felt inspired an early prototype we called “adventure life”, which was meant to help people with different kinds of chronic illnesses learn how to live more fully outside their perceived limitations
Adventurous young type 1 diabetic who had traveled to Thailand but not scuba dived because he assumed he couldn’t. When we told him that diving can safely be practiced by diabetics he responded with intense curiosity: “What’s the best type of sugar to bring and how do I store it?”
Being able to hear stories or talk to people writing the app- video or contact person form. “It’s one thing to read it online and another thing to talk to someone who’s done it” “how do I even start the planning process” Would want to ask about how they brought medicine, if checked blood before dive. Maybe a timeline of how to prepare for diabetic vs a regular person.
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Reaction: “I’m kind of adventurous about food, but sometimes say fuck it with my blood. This would be nice to have both.”
This prototype alerted us to the importance of determining how most users intuitively understand and organize dietary information, and the importance of personalization and minimizing friction. This insight would be helpful for helping users navigate new foods painlessly without having to compromise their health, and feel less separation from other healthy individuals.
3 primary tasks of app:
Food recognition
Logging blood sugar data and food eaten
Sharing food on social media
Prototype: Feast
Task Flows
Implemented task flow for sharing in medium-fidelity prototype
Design idea- single sketch illustrating idea
UI sketches- sketches illustrating key screens
UI storyboard- task flow for each task showing relationships between screens and how they transition.
(Midterm- review difference between task flows, etc.)
Ask about his ideas of diff between UX / UI / interaction design / interface design, etc.
UX Designers deliver customer insights, personas, customer journey maps and the like.
Concept video (illustrate context of use): https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=Kdhd0HiE7jc
Rapid / low fi paper prototyping and evaluation:
Lo-fi prototype for speed of iteration: one designer “plays computer”, others observe and record
"It's almost all Greeked" - squiggly lines instead of text
(on a rough paper prototype, etc.)
Invision prototype: https://invis.io/VROKHDZ2KH8#/202153482_IPhone_7_17
Performed heuristic evaluation to check compliance with usability principles / improve UI
Insights 1
Restaurauturs often desire to communicate their culture through their restaurant experience, which doesn’t always come across to their diners
Diners at varying interest levels? (stated above)
->maybe this is results not insights?
The vast majority of diners not interested: “if it doesn’t help me make the decision…"
Foreign diners in restaurants serving local food were more engaged due to different expectations- tasty food integrated into routine vs specific time set aside for adventure: greater interest and receptivity to new learning as part of the travel experience.
As a result, we decided to invert the experience to foreign visitors experiencing local food for greater traction around the dining as a portal to deeper cultural understanding, since the context of travel brings additional focus to foreign culture.
Japan Phase: Tokyo
In order to prepare for the experience, I read extensively on Japanese culture, food, and history, and taught myself to read and speak some basic Japanese. When I arrived in Japan, I immersed myself in every aspect of Japanese culture possible, from Izakayas to Kaiseki, Onigiri to Natto, Ryokan to Capsule Hotels.
I was blown away by the meticulousness and craft that permeates Japanese culture, and the nuance of expression and profusion of detail and minute rituals that characterize so much of Japanese life.
The multicultural teams were partly out of water in both America and Japan, and the Japanese members of our team helped us understand the nuance of many details we had glossed over or missed entirely and added immense color and significance to experiences we had no way of understanding culturally.
(From this perspective,) it was easy to tell from our initial interviews with foreign visitors that although they were enjoying the experience, they were getting far less understanding and satisfaction out of their experience visiting Japan than we were, since they had no locals to explain the significance of the alien experiences they were navigating. (And were usually less bold at jumping into unfamiliar situations)
Typical “WTF Japan" experiences for foreigners:
Insights 2:
Opaque Japan
Many western visitors found Japanese culture to be fascinating but largely inscrutable due to large cultural differences, the insular nature of Japanese society, and significant language barriers, and learned fairly little about Japanese thought and culture during their visit. (/And were often as confused as enlightened by their trip)
Many aspects of life have deep cultural roots that aren’t apparent to casual observers
Visitors who tried asking frequently found that locals weren’t comfortable answering in English, and offered short polite answers that didn’t offer much insight
Footnote- Culture
Ramen and Sushi “collecting”: grasping for the familiar
We were surprised to learn how frequently visitors knowledge of Japanese food was limited to ramen and sushi, and often oriented their culinary experience around hunting for the “best” sushi restaurants they had read about, or hunting for certain kinds of ramen.
These familiar foods often function as a kind of “beachhead” into the otherwise opaque and unfamiliar Japanese culture.
Into Japanese culture, which due to significant cultural differences and language barrier can seem opaque to outsiders
Visitors also frequently had identified certain kinds of food or particular experiences and were trying to “collect” these to check off their lists for “bragging rights” back home. For example, to try fugu fish, or eat every kind of ramen.
“Nuggets" of information without context
They were proud to share information they had gleaned (such as that it was polite to slurp ramen) but often had no understanding of the context or reasoning behind it (such as that slurping is supposed to enhance flavor, similar to why wine connoisseurs swirl and gurgle when tasting).
Extreme users: one especially adventurous solo traveler from Amsterdam would order food without knowing what it was (since he couldn’t read the menu), then use Google on his phone to research it when it arrived.
Prototype: Hanafooda
These insights inspired us to create a way for western visitors to start with what’s familiar to them and help find the best and most unique instances of that while prompting them to branch out and try additional connected foods and experiences with bite-size snippets of Japanese culture for context.
Picture: slide: Old / New Japanese cards -> new game
We were inspired by traditional japanese matching card games like Hanafuda and the craze around new “AR” games like Pokemon Go, particularly its remarkable ability to provoke real-world activity in pursuit of in-game achievements (sufficient to inadvertently improve players’ physical fitness). We built a wireframe experience prototype of a digital card collecting game in Invision called “Hanafooda”, which we envisioned launching in conjunction with the influx of tourists for the 2020 Tokyo olympics.
Like Pokemon Go, where the game incorporates users’ location from their smartphone to allow them to hunt and acquire Pokemon in different locales, Hanafooda would have different restaurants and experiences labeled, and users could acquire cards by visiting the corresponding restaurant, such as getting a ramen card at a ramen shop. Each virtual card would both have artwork relating to the food on the front, and information about it on the back.
Also like the traditional Hanafuda card game, collecting certain combinations of cards gives players bonuses, for which we created special achievement cards. For example, a user can acquire the Salaryman achievement for trying yakitori, beers, and ramen. The corresponding Salaryman card explains the concept of the “salaryman” white collar worker and significance/context of those foods in the salarymen lifestyle.
In this rough sketched paper experience prototype, the user creates an account and the initial loading screen is an empty Tokyo Metro car. The app then shows the location of the user with different available experiences nearby. The user visits a ramen shop and gets a ramen card, which completes their 3-card salaryman achievement (skipping the acquiring of the other 2 cards for expediency). The salaryman achievement is awarded, and the loading screen now includes has the salaryman lounging in the metro car. In this embodiment of the app, each subsequent achievement would add the corresponding character to the scene.
Footnote 1: Teaching design thinking in East Asian culture
There can be unexpected challenges to effectively teaching design thinking and western innovation processes across cultures. Teaching design thinking and other western innovation processes and mindsets across cultures can be challenging. During brainstorming for example, the group has a totally flat hierarchy and the ideas of everyone in the room are considered equal (in order to ensure the creativity of the entire group can be tapped instead of just the bosses). However, the languages of Japan and other East Asian countries have a system of encoding honorifics into vocabulary to indicate relative social status of speaker and listener, which can make the extreme egalitarian nature of this process difficult to practice.
Footnote 2: Japanese demographics and culture
Japanese society's extraordinarily insular nature (98.5% ethnic japanese, one of the most homogenous of industrialized countries), historical precedent of being closed to outsiders, and understated culture? can mean that westerners can have trouble connecting with and understanding local culture.
Because most Japanese have infrequent contact with Gaijin (“outsiders"), interactions with tourists can be awkward, and the language barrier frequently contributes to awkwardness since many locals aren’t confident in speaking English (Japanese curricula usually emphasize written English more than spoken English).
Although being a “gaijin” allows you to get away with all kinds of offenses with impunity (partly because most Japanese people aren’t comfortable with confronting you and explaining at length in English why some aspect of your behavior is offensive), the flip side is that outsiders who live in Japan usually feel that they are never fully accepted into Japanese society.
https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/5-reasons-foreigners-find-it-hard-to-become-friends-with-japanese-people https://kotaku.com/5963524/sometimes-interaction-with-foreigners-is-awkward-even-in-japanese-anime/
Footnote 3: Card games in Japan
Japan has a history of constantly mutating card games due to frequent bans on different kinds of cards because of their use in gambling. Nintendo corporation actually started to produce hand-painted Hanafuda decks on the bark of mulberry trees before it switched focus to video games, but still produces the cards today!
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