Ned the Fish
Timeframe 10 weeks part-time, Individual Project
Case Study
People are not aware of the importance of fish and the range of fish available, that can have a positive impact on health. As a nation we are eating too much sugar and my aim is to encourage a change by educating and motivating people to eat fish. My mission is to remind people of the importance of fish and to encourage them to reintroduce it to their weekly diet.
Approach
The Channel 4 documentary ‘The World’s Best Diet’ reveals Iceland as the healthiest nation thanks to their fresh fish. This got me thinking what a great idea it would be to get people eating me fish to improve their health.
I started to look at competitors and found three key ones: Headspace, Water Log and Apple’s health app.
I looked at several attributes: ‘Ease of Use’, ‘Visual Appeal’, ‘find ability’, ‘Convenience of Health Benefits’ and ‘Visibility of Functionality’. I rated these attributes against my competitors and found Water Log’s small interface, layout and ease of use stood out the most. I took inspiration from Water Log going forward with my project.
I created a discussion guide with questions on exploring the health benefits of fish. I interviewed people who eat fish and people who don’t eat fish. Emily likes fish because it’s ‘easy to cook, healthier then red meat and light’ while Fi ‘wished she ate more fish and is interested in the health benefits’. The key findings was that users knowledge of fish was limited.
I synthesised my research and created personas to guide my design thinking. ‘Sarah’ is a health freak who works as a nutritionist expert while ‘Bill’ is a lover of the sugar rush and eats fast food like burgers and chips.
I chose Bill as my main persona to think about when going through my interface because of his bad eating habits and his lifestyle choices. I wrote a hypothesis basing it around improving people’s quality of life by making them healthier.
The two user flows I created was ‘Logging the Fish, Decreasing the Portions’ and the other user flow was ‘Viewing the Fish’s Information’ such as the health benefits.
I sketched out the interface and testing the first version on several users but users found the buttons in the wrong place and it was difficult to know if people would actually use this app on a daily basis.
Result
Users found they’d log their fish intake weekly instead of everyday as they might get sick of the fish so I changed this on my interface. When you’ve added a fish it only tells you how many portions you’ve added and not what the fish is called so the users didn’t know which fish they’ve added. For the next steps I’d incorporate settings and history because users kept clicking on these button on the interface.
