WIRL App - Teaching intuitive eating for a healthy body and mind.
Empowering women to enjoy food unrestrictively.
Overview
The client: WIRL (Wellness in Real Life) is a startup founded by two nutrition & wellness experts who are dedicated to empowering women to enjoy food wholeheartedly and unrestrictively. Their mission is to create a world where diets don’t exist and people have a positive relationship between both food and themselves.
The challenge: To progress their idea of teaching women to eat intuitively to free up time energy and mental load around food. The client wanted us work out what needs to go into the digital version of their program and flesh out how it should all come together.
Synopsis: I was one of two UX designers working on this project. Due to covid-restrictions, the project was conducted remotely.
Date & Duration: Feb 2021 | 2.5 weeks.
My role: Project management, past research analysis, target audience research, problem identification, ideation, concept generation, mid-fidelity prototyping, concept and usability testing, and business & content strategy.
Outcome: Delivered business and content strategy recommendations based on our research findings and insights, as well as a clickable, mid-fidelity prototype of the app that the client could further develop.
Tools: Pen + Paper, Miro, Figma, Zoom, Slack.
Methods:
Business analysis
Competitor analysis
User research
Affinity mapping + data synthesis
Persona & Archetype development
Problem definition + design hypothesis
Design Studio workshop with clients
Ideation + design strategy
Feature prioritisation
Cost vs Impact analysis
Sketching
Concept testing + iteration
Wireframing
Prototyping
Usability testing
TL;DR
Women have a lot of mental load around eating which affects their ability to earn and learn.
The real problem (discovered through our research)
Eating habits are multi-faceted. For many women, this revolves around weight-loss or weight maintenance because women have a mixed relationship with their bodies which they don’t openly acknowledge so don’t see it as being “a problem” that they would need to seek help for.
There is confusion about what to eat and the right nutrition because there is a fair amount of conflicting information available.
Guilt creeps in when eating the so-called wrong food and unhealthy eating habits are the result.
The Solution
A nutritionist in your pocket
A nutrition-driven app that subtly teaches mindful and intuitive eating (trojan horse style) to help women enjoy eating for nourishment over weight-loss.
Key features of the MVP include a 1:1 onboarding consult with a nutritionist; a meal variety checker; a comprehensive recipe library that can be filtered by mood/emotion/energy level; nutritionist recommended recipes; tailored educational content in the form of lessons + exercises.
Outcome:
• Delivered business and content strategy recommendations informed by our research findings and insights
• Clickable, mid-fidelity prototype of the app for the client to further develop.
Case study
Analysing the clients’ research
The client provided us with 4 years worth of extensive research which included their hypothesis of the problem, their target user, how they potentially see themselves approaching it as well as competitor and comparator research. The first step of our process was to review and analyse their insights and findings.
Their target user was young women aged 18–34. We had questions of our own to further understand “intuitive eating” and if women understood this concept and what it meant to them.
Our research
Understanding women’s behaviours and emotions around what and how they eat.
Why do women eat the way they do? How do they decide? Is there planning involved?
Where do they get their dietary information from? How do they feel about it?
Do they consider themselves healthy? Why / why not?
What are the emotions women have around eating / diet culture?
Are women stressed when deciding what to eat for dinner? Do they experience food-guilt?
What does nutrition / “eating well” mean to women?
Insights
We interviewed 8 young women and uncovered these key insights:
Women are motivated by weight loss/maintenance because they have a mixed relationship with their bodies.
Women value nutrition because they want to thrive in life.
Women tend to be restrictive about their diets so they can feel in control of their eating habits. Those that are restrictive don’t think they are, so don’t see a problem with the way they eat.
Women equate being ‘healthy’ to a ‘balanced’ lifestyle because they desire flexibility to make their own decisions (about both diet and life).
Women like planning their meals ahead of time because they’re time-poor during the week and to avoid eating junk.
Women don’t know what to eat because they don’t know what’s good for them because there is too much conflicting information out there.
Ideation & Concepts
Testing early
Concept 1 was created from a collaborative Design Studio workshop we held with our clients. The concept was a “Headspace-like app but for food” which taught intuitive eating through lessons and exercises and treated food guilt and other forms of mental load head-on. It was a way for women to engage with it whenever they were experiencing these feelings around eating. It also had meal planning, recipes, variety checking, nutrition lessons, and a gamified tracking function featuring a “growing” veggie garden or a “wellness tree”.
The response to Concept 1 wasn’t entirely favourable:
• They didn’t actually understand what intuitive eating meant
• They didn’t feel motivated to learn about or engage with the app when they were feeling “bad” about what they ate.
• They also didn’t find it of value to download and pay for this app or to use it every day as the features didn’t seem different enough to what was already out there in terms of meal planning, recipes and using “other websites” to learn about general nutrition.
Insight: Intuitive eating requires a mindset shift. Involving a psychologist is just as important as a nutritionist.
An insight that emerged from concept testing was that the ‘intuitive eating’ or ‘mindset shift’ feature would be led by a psychologist and that the recipes would be chef-created so they would be both healthy and tasty.
What resonated with users most however, was what our clients stood for and their approach to health and wellbeing for women. Users also liked the idea of the variety tracker, personalised recipes and learning about what was relevant to them specifically.
Evangelising the concept of UX design to our clients
We had arrived at an interesting juncture and what transpired made this project an incredibly valuable experience overall.
We presented the above findings to our clients along with alternate recommendations such as the other products/services/things they could do instead of or in conjunction with an app — to have a bigger impact to shift women’s mindset around food, guilt and body image. We suggested various ideas such as running workshops, a podcast, a YouTube channel, a book, website content / tools, etc. We didn’t want to design the “wrong thing” (the above app) knowing that users didn’t find value in many of the features or desire even downloading the app let alone paying for it on a subscription model.
We explained to our clients that for them to succeed, it was important that we “designed the right thing” before we “designed the thing right”.
Reframing our strategy due to constraints
We were fortunate to have clients who were so wonderful to work with. They were open and receptive to our findings and insights. While they were open to adopting alternate strategies, they did let us know that the MVP needed to be an app because they were receiving tech funding for an app. They asked us to ideate on ways we could create a successful app with only the features that resonated with our target users.
We knew that the nutrition-based features — the variety tracker, personal recipe recommendations and relevant lessons were what users liked.
We pivoted our strategy into a more nutrition-driven app that subtly teaches intuitive eating (trojan horse style) and mindfulness in a less confronting way.
Meal-time gratitude
We ideated and iterated our concept with elements and features that resonated with our target audience while fulfilling our clients ‘WHY’ of creating this app.
Some of my contributions to the app features included:
• A nutritionist-in-your-pocket solution.
• Meal-time meditation to enable mindfulness & intuitive eating and foster gratitude.
• Meal-time audio learning about the meal ingredients, nourishment and their benefits to the body and mind.
• Personalised recipe recommendations & advanced recipe search including searching for recipes based on the user’s current mood.
• Variety checker rating on food groups, flavours and textures.
Give the app a WIRL!
I am excited to share that WIRL iterated on our concept and launched their app in just over a year since we worked with them. Very proud of our work and contribution to the initial concept. The app includes many of our ideas which is wonderful to see.
I hope the app enables our lovely clients Brie and Alicia to achieve what they set out to - empowering people to have a healthy and mindful relationship with food, their minds and their bodies.
wirl.app