Coach Viva App

A smart food logging tool for highly motivated individuals. Coach Viva's mission is to make personalized weight-loss coaching compassionate, lasting, and vastly more affordable. This project aims to create a platform for clients to track their weight loss progress, while getting the most out of the coaching experience.

Timeline

Feb 2020 - June 2021

Role

This was a part-time pro bono role. I provided a mobile application concept to scale Coach Viva to onboard more customers, and provided a repeatable usability testing system for the co-founders

food-report 1.png

An example of a report that coaches or data-entry people will have to generate to the clients after gathering all food entries from the chat log. They will have to manually parse through chats or record these notes to generate a progress report.

The Problem

Our goal is to move away from chat-based platform to an app-based platform in order to achieve more coaching scalability when more clients join Coach Viva. The chat-based platform is tedious for coaches to generate reports, and doesn’t provide a way for clients to independently keep track of their progress. The challenge is to maintain that sense of “personalized and human” experience.

The Clients

  • Have tried all sorts of diet regimens and meal plans and have not been able to stick to any of them

  • Feel like they are stuck in a rut and cannot make progress

  • Need more external accountability due to difficulties with self-management. Clients liked being able to feel like they’re telling someone what they ate, instead of giving the information to a bot.

  • During client interviews, we learned that having to specify exact quantities can be stressful. They would much prefer taking photos of the food, put a simple description, and have the data entry person on the other side figure out the calories for the clients.

  • In apps like My Fitness Pal and Lifesum, where there is already a database of foods, users would have to specify what type of banana they ate. This is can be cumbersome while logging. The user just wants to log a banana and call it a day.

Lean UX Methodology

I used the Lean UX Methodology as a small team (6 people) with limited time and resources. The CEO and CTO were also nutrition coaches, so they received a lot of insight from customers and I was able to use those insights to build, test, iterate.

Guerilla Testing

  • Created a usability testing kit (Survey and Task Scenario Sheet)

  • Of 40 clients, 4 signed up for testing sessions

  • Prompted them with a scenario

  • Participants shared their screens and asked to think aloud
    Collected scores out of 5 for ease of use, efficiency, and satisfaction
    We recorded their feedback (took notes and asked for permission to record)

Iterations over time

We went through lots and lots of iterations and was able to test the last 3 iterations with clients.

Final Iteration Results

  • Users liked seeing the list of food they ate during the day, it gave them a sense of the quantity and quality of foods they ate.

  • 4/4 of interviewed participants said that the history feature will save them time from manual logging

  • Users still wanted a way to take pictures of their food and log them later. We did not solve this problem in this version.

  • Colors should make the users feel less guilty

    Average Scores (Out of 5):
    Ease of Use: 4.75/5
    Efficiency: 5/5
    Satisfaction: 4.75/5

Design Principles

After testing sessions, we agreed upon some design principles that will help focus our design to meet the needs of our clients. These principles were formed based on the scenarios and pain-points gathered from our clients.

Balance structure and flexibility

It’s crucial to be able to separate logging and coaching. While it’s important to have structure for users to log food, they also want to be able to make changes or ask questions on their food. This flexibility makes coaching more delightful and less intimidating.

Effortless Logging

Coach Viva doesn’t currently have a database of existing foods that users can use to log food. Instead they rely on real people to measure and log food based on pictures and descriptions. Users find this to be less stressful than getting immediate feedback on calories. They just want to take a photo, put a quick description, and let Coach Viva do the rest of the calculation.

Accountability without shame

Logging a chocolate bar can cause some feelings of shame when a user is trying to cut down sugar and lose some pounds. But the key is to be gentle with feedback when a user is reaching their daily calorie goal for the day— to hold them accountable but not shame them or make them feel like they did something very wrong.

Daily Summary

On this page, the user can see an overview of all the foods they’ve eaten and manage their daily calorie budget. It helps to see photos of all the foods for the day in order to reflect on food intake quality.

Manage Daily Calorie Intake

This is the single most important metric on the Daily Homepage for our users. We came up with a gentle way to indicate calorie progress for the day. Colors really help the users understand their intake for the day.

Add New or Existing Foods

Users can easily add a new food or add existing foods in a seamless manner.

Unlike most food logging apps, the user can simply take a picture and write a rough description, and the coach will do the calculations for you.

Edit Entry

Users like the flexibility of being able to adjust and correct their logs, however, we still needed to impose structure to help data entry managers keep track of every food entry. To solve this problem, we’ve provided two features in logging.

Adjusting and Correcting Logs

  1. Correcting the entry

    The user can specify in free writing how they would like to adjust their entry. This can be additions to the entry, changes in quantity, changes in food brand. The idea is to have a way for users to quickly make a correction with little effort.

  2. Chat about entry

    The user can also chat or ask questions about their food entry. This is a core part of Coach Viva’s experience, where coaching and discussing foods is more important than the food logging itself. We wanted to provide this feature so that users feel that they are being taken care of.

Search History

In the chat experience, it was very common for users to log “breakfast from yesterday” as they expected data entry managers to parse through the chat to figure out what the user has eaten the previous day. So, our solution was to have a history page where the user can select the most recently logged food. They are also able to search for the foods they have previously entered. Again, this allows for quick logging with a little more structure that will help data entry managers.

Engineering Hand-Off

Organization is very important when it comes to designing good experiences. It helps with engineering teams have a reliable source of truth, as well as documentation teams.

Results

● Daily active users increased by about 26%

● Eliminated the need for coaches to monitor data entry (1-2 hrs/day to 0 hrs/day)

● During the last feedback session, 4/4 interviewed participants said the history feature will save them food logging time.

Lessons

Overall, this was a great learning experience designing a consumer-facing product. We had the ability to be absolutely customer-centric and lean in our design process: iteration and feedback every few cycles. We managed to deliver a working product in a short time-frame by constantly conducting user testing sessions and adjusting our designs to what our customers value. We were really able to nail the effortless logging experience and somehow emulate a bit of the chat experience to the app experience.

The biggest challenge was trying to decide between prioritizing data entry managers and client experience, but after iterations, we came up with something that could balance both. A lot of work is still needed to improve the portion and quantity adjustment since users currently still heavily rely on manual entry to make corrections and adjustments. If I were to change anything about this project, it would be to do more competitive research on other food logging applications and try to leverage the best experiences that already exists out there. We heavily focused on our own clients because Coach Viva’s focus is external accountability and providing their clients with nutritional authority.