Healthy Eating

How can we help UT students meet their healthy eating goals?

Oftentimes, it is hard for college students to juggle their academics while still maintaining a healthy lifestyle. To understand the eating and cooking habits of UT students, the team developed a variety of user personas that ranged in cooking expertise and allotted time they had to cook. With extensive research, the team examined issues that the average user encountered such as lack of knowledge about healthy eating, lack of time to prepare meals, and the inconvenience of grocery shopping.

Back to Projects page

Final Presentation from DFA Expo

Spring 2020

Context

Gen Z Trends

33% of people eat fast food regularly
12% of people eat at restaurants regularly
27% of people go to the gym regularly

Healthy Eating

In order to understand the issue of healthy eating, the team delved into two questions...
- What comes to mind when you think of healthy eating?
- How would you ideally prepare food for yourself?

Immersion

Research

The team gathered both quantitative and qualitative data about healthy eating
- They created an Eating Survey that asked respondents about their perceptions of healthy eating and their wellness goals.
- From the survey, they set up User Interviews to learn more about a person's food journey and how they ideally would like to prepare food.

Overarching themes from research

#1: Time crunch
- Students often don't have time to prepare food between classes and extracurriculars.
#2: Winging it
- Students don’t know how to plan and shop accordingly for their meals.
#3: Sticking to familiarity
- Many students don’t have the skills needed to prepare a meal from scratch, so they fall back on things they know.
#4: If it ain't broke don't fix it
- Some students know that they aren’t making the healthiest eating choices but are satisfied because it’s affordable and works for their schedule.

Ideation

User Personas

There are a variety of students on college campuses with different schedules and levels of cooking skills.
To recognize similarities between users, the team created three different user personas and mapped their daily food journey.
Ultimately, they decided to focus on the user persona of Sarah because she reflected the average student that cooks for herself but also buys food when she is on a time crunch.

Implementation

Prototype

From each of Sarah's frustrations with healthy eating, they developed a potential prototype that might solve her daily issues.

Frustration #1: Lack of knowledge
- Website that compiles a list of healthy recipes that share a majority of ingredients for the week.
Frustration #2: Grocery shopping is inconvenient
- From the list of ingredients needed for the week, the website would allow the user to add all the items into their online shopping cart.
Frustration #3: Lack of time for cooking
- The recipes chosen suit meals for one person. These recipes can easily be made within thirty minutes to an hour.

Next Steps

Ideation

Ideation session: brainstorm more ideas
Deep dive into the causes of Sarah's frustrations
How might we help alleviate Sarah's pain points?

Prototyping

Research different platforms for the final product - online, physical, etc
Create a product that can be used by the greatest number of people
User testing so we can iterate and refine