Nooch
Design System and Branding
According to the Ramapo College of New Jersey, “A balanced diet can help students increase energy levels, promote a functioning immune system,
improve their ability to cope with stress, and increase concentration and performance in school.”
College is busy- between classes, homework, internships and jobs, extracurriculars, and finding the time to have a social life and rest, priorities are bound to get skewed. Taking the time to properly nourish your body should be at the top of the list of priorities, but most of the time it becomes the last of our concerns. Without affordable, nutritious, and available options, students reach for whatever is quickest or don’t reach for anything at all, creating inconsistent eating habits. Eating is directly tied to performance and mental stamina which is imperative as a college student.
As students ourselves, we’ve seen first hand how challenging it is to manage our time and eating habits. Anything that takes away from time to get work done feels like wasted time, even when it is something as important as fueling our bodies.
This semester-long project was conducted as a group to take on the challenge of creating a solution to this issue. We split up responsibilities each week utilizing our skills between the branding and UX/UI design.
INITIAL FINDINGS (PRIMARY RESEARCH)
Before starting the project, it was important to do some formative research.
What is the problem?
Students, especially college kids, can have a hard time balancing proper eating during their busy school schedules. Balancing social lives and school can be overwhelming and in that state students are either led to less fulfilling options or none at all and just skipping meals.
“For students in particular, factors influencing dietary habits include time, availability of healthy options, friends’ eating habits, and nutritional knowledge. University stakeholders can support healthy eating by making healthy options affordable, accessible, and desirable while providing information on making healthy food and beverage choices.”- NYU
Why do students need healthy options?
Inadequate diet can lead to fatigue, impaired decision-making, slow you down, lead to a shorter temper or even stress and depression
How do we introduce healthier eating habits to students?
Making more nutritious food that is accessible, affordable, and sustainable.
SECONDARY RESEARCH
Survey Results
We then employed various research methods to form the product around the needs of the user via user feedback.
Some notable questions were:
-How much do you prioritize nutrition?
-Do you feel as if Temple provides good and accessible nutritious options?
-What does a day of eating look like for you?
-What type of food/drink are you most inclined to get while on campus?
Value Proposition Canvas
We next performed a value proposition to get a better understanding of the potential user’s frustrations with current options on the market in order to provide a service that stands out from possible competitors.
Competitor Analysis
We scoped out some companies with similar goals as us to see how we could create a unique and better experience for our users.
User Personas
It was now time to create personas for potential users based on the formative research and our understanding of the target demographic.
Solution
An app that tracks the user’s eating habits with their class schedule and creates a plan with reminders and recommendations of where and how to fuel up. The app correlates to vending machines that provide healthy and quick options for the on-the-go student to grab in between classes.
HOW NOOCH WORKS
- Download the app and sign up
- Take our “Goals and Preferences” survey
- Allow notifications, or “nudges”
- Sync your calendar and allow nooch to suggest an eating plan specific to you
- Feel more in control of your eating habits with the guilt-free check-ins and helpful pushes from nooch!
BRANDING
NAME
We wanted to create a positive connection between the user and the app while promoting the app’s goal. We brainstormed a variety of catchy words based around health, food, and nutrition before landing on nooch. Easy to pronounce and easy to remember, nooch puts a fun spin on nutrition- exactly our goal with this app.
LOGO
To avoid the obvious cliches when it comes to food iconography (fork and knife, chef’s hat, etc.) we decided to create a typographic logo solution. This way, our brand was able to stand as a strong and unique asset of it’s own, not be reliant on others as a crutch to understand who we are and what this app “makes” you do.
Design System
Prototypes
Taking the knowledge we gathered from our formative research, surveys, and competitor analysis, we were ready to get started on our prototypes. After brainstorming all the tasks we wanted nooch to perform, we made a user flow. This flow informed how the user would navigate through nooch with the goal of an easy to maneuver interface.
Once the user flow was finalized, it was time to sketch out our paper prototypes. We created several drafts of the prototypes, focusing more heavily on the user experience. Our design process was influenced by peer reviews and our competitor analysis, such as creating the homepage as a dashboard with the calendar listed.
We then moved our finalized paper prototypes into Figma and began wireframing. Having the flow of our app sorted out before beginning the wireframe process allowed us to focus more on the UI in the digital space, as well as clean up our current prototype and get a feel for the visual design choices.
After multiple drafts, we came to the end of the app design process with a final result we truly love, backed by research and branded in a way that inspires the user to build healthy habits guilt-free.
BRAND EXTENSION: VENDING MACHINES
We felt that the only way to provide true nutrition to the user was to create trustworthy solutions to the main user problems we found in our research: lack of time, lack of nutritious options, and lack of money. Creating vending machines that provide options for people to pick up an affordable snack on the go would create more opportunity for students to meet their eating habit goals.
We mocked up what these vending machines would look like and what products they would house. The branding was informed by our style tile and design choices made for the app interface.
CONCLUSION
College is full of firsts, and for many it is the first time students are tasked with fueling themselves without help. Nooch creates the opportunity to create healthy habits that will benefit students in both their everyday life and in the long run through daily check-ins and custom meal plans to stay on track.
Working as a team of two created new opportunities and challenges neither of us had encountered before. Throughout the process we learned how to collaborate and bring our personal skill sets to the table to create an app we both love and are proud of. Creating with UX/UI at the forefront provided a new perspective that we will both take with us into future projects.
Designers: Marina Sepe and Grace Alderman
Art Direction: Courtney Spencer
Tyler School of Art and Architecture