A Google Chrome plugin that allows users with allergies to shop online without worrying about buying food with allergens.
As part of this design challenge, you and your team will design solutions for providing healthier food options, which might include providing people with better food choices, the skills to cook healthier food, or the knowledge to make healthier food choices.
First, we wanted to understand more about the people we are designing for and explore unfamiliar contexts in this topic. In this phase, we have focused on four aspects during our field research— learn from people, learn from experts, immerse ourselves in context, and seek analogous inspiration.
We have conducted surveys to learn about people's eating habits and the frustration they face when living with food allergies. We also interviewed doctors and nurses to understand what they suggest people do with food allergies.
Do you have food allergies?
have food allergies
Have you ever tried to relieve allergy symptoms?
have tried to relieve their allergy symptoms
How do you relieve allergy symptoms?
control allergy symptoms with dietary changes
Have you tried finding a similar (flavor or texture) food to replace the food you are allergic to?
have tried to find alternative food
Additionally, we created a user journey map based on field observations of a friend who is allergic to milk having a grocery shopping experience.
It is difficult to know whether one food product contains allergens.
It is challenging to stop eating food that has allergens.
For family grocery shopping, it is hard to remember food that meets everyone's allergy limitation.
How might we list recommended ingredients or foods that can be substituted?
How might we integrate food allergy information into people's grocery shopping process?
How might we provide users with detailed food ingredient labelling (including allergens)?
How might we make it easier for people to shop for family members who has different dietary limitations?
Google Chrome plug-in for community online grocery shopping.
A function to integrate the dietary information of different family members.
A function to double-check if the item contains allergens when checking out.
Recommend related products when shopping.
Recommend allergy-friendly stores when shopping.
An immediate pop-up screen to show an allergen alert.
Use clear icons to identify different allergens.
Allow users to create different profiles with their own allergens in it.
Provide similar flavor or texture options when choosing substitute ingredients.
Mark products as allergen items for future reference.
Easily switch between different users.
Design that can easily navigate the application.
Provide a list that contains all the food with allergens.
Allow people to enter the URL of products that will cause allergies.
Remember your last time purchase and allow you to mark as allergen or save as favorite.
Recommend allergy-friendly stores when shopping.
Allow users to create different profiles with their own allergens in it.
Provide similar flavor or texture options when choosing recommended alternative.
Enter product URL to mark as allergy food for future reference.
An immediate pop-up screen to show an allergen alert.
Use clear icons to identify different allergens.
Recommend related products when shopping.
It’s convenient to know if the food have allergens when shopping.
It’s convenient to choose multiple profile when shopping for the whole family.
It is clear to see the name tag next to the item when checking out.
It's a bit confusing what the exclamation mark is for. I hope it can also show which allergen in the product when alerting.
In this project, I focused on user research and design and collaborated with the UI team to deliver better shopping experiences for people with allergy. I learned to scale down the problems and identify pain points through different research methods, such as field observations, card sorting, surveys, interviews, and user testing.
I also leaned that iteration is the key since it allow us to try fast and know which design works better. Making rough visual prototypes can help better communication, and allow us to gain different perspective from the user testing.