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Designing Bacon-o-Meter : Case Study

A case study on designing a movie recommendation application

Introduction

Bacon is a type of salt-cured pork made from various cuts, typically the belly or less fatty parts of the back. It is eaten as a side dish (particularly in breakfasts), used as a central ingredient (e.g., the bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich (BLT), or as a flavouring or accent (as in bacon crumbles in a salad).

From the above, you probably have figured out that Bacon is amazing. Although bacon offers awesome deliciousness and crunchiness, with certain health benefits, there are also the concern that an unhealthy level of consumption can lead to certain health risks (increased cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, stroke, etc.).

User Story

As a bacon lover, I want an app where I can see how much bacon I’ve consumed and how much more I can eat, so that I can enjoy bacon but still stay kinda healthy.

Feature Set

Users can track how much Bacon they’ve consumed, including the calories

Users can see how much Bacon they can still consume this week

Approach

In his book “Talking to Humans’, Gill Constable popularized a user/customer-centric approach that I adopted for this project. The fulcrum of his approach is embedded in a design thinking method of challenging assumptions made in risk hypothesis from the purview of the customer.

Riskiest Hypothesis

The belief that people will want to use an application for tracking bacon consumption i.e the assumption that the total addressable market (TAM) is large enough.

Semi-Structured Interview

To keep my research as short as possible due to the short timeline, I reached out to people around me who I know are on a diet or body building program for insights.

This was was structured around food consumption in general because Bacon is not popular in Nigeria.

The purpose was to determine their pain points, needs, and behavior of their calorie and nutrient calculations to achieve their ideal body targets. In this way, I know their problems and then try to interpret it into a needs statement in the context of Bacon consumption. It’s better to know their real problem on the field from their perspectives rather than guessing the problem.

Data Gathering

On gathering responses, I picked important insights and translated them into statements so I can have a vision of what features will appear on the mobile app.

User’s Problem Statements

I don’t mind tracking my food consumption but getting the exact calories of the meal is going to be a problem for me.

I want to be able to see my progress. Some sort of report showing me what I consumed a previous week comparing it against the one before that.

Competitive Research

During my interview with users, some mentioned using an application called Fitness Pal.

I downloaded it, collected more inspiration by using it. I study their flow, their strengths, and weaknesses to create more effective flow and feature. I also collect more inspiration for visual design (UI & Information Architecture).

Persona

After data gathering and extracting the problem statements, I needed to visualize those needs into a persona.

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Screen Shot 2021-09-15 at 9.54.36 AM.png

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User Flow

In this user flow, I prepared a routine for onboarding, adding/logging bacon consumption the user (which can be done by selecting the type of bacon and quantity. the calories will be calculated automatically for the user. this can be achieved via APIs provided by

USDA⁠

), reports on bacon consumption etc.

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Design

Wireframes

From the user flow, I was able to design wireframes for few screens to help better visualize the screens, space allocation, content hierarchy, functionalities and the interactions between them.

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High Fidelity Designs

After establishing the rhythm from the wireframes, I got into the high fidelity design and prototyping. Designed a flows for users who wants a tour of the application post-onboarding and those who don’t care for it.

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onboarding screens

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add bacon screens

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report on bacon consumed in calories and grams

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`View Clickable Prototype`⁠
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Evaluation

Usability Testing

The next step is usability testing. I did this by sharing the link with some of my friends and jumping on a video call with them so they can share their screen while using it. The aim was to observe and learn.

Conclusion

There will always be iteration for any product, because there’s no such thing is the best product, but there’s always a better product.

Based on the usability testing, here’s the thing for what to do next:

Users should be able to add a bacon by scanning a bar code.

Recipe for preparing bacon

Ability see what friends (that you have as contacts and are users of the app) are doing in terms of tracking bacon consumption.

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