The Problem

According to the CDC(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), obesity now affects 20% of kids and adolescents in the United States. School is a good starting point to address this problem by implementing a healthier food selection. However, many schools provide limited meal plans and lack of awareness to influence kids’ eating habits. Picky eaters are intended to eat junk food and only eat certain foods. Good guidance from school and parents’ will broaden the variety of Ingredients, which develop their tastebuds and balanced diet.

How can I design an experience where schools can influence kids’ food choices?

The Goal

Let kids themselves make healthier food selections

Creating an experience to help kids making their dietary choices was a challenge. Since the selections of food are not so clear and kids get bored quickly and not knowing how to have a healthier dietary. Therefore, schools can act as a role to cultivate kids’ eating habits, which will have a significant impact on their life later on. The goal is to create an engaging application with an easy-to-navigate environment to involve school, kids, and parents.

The Solution

Design a user-friendly gameplay experience that encourages kids to eat smarter while providing valuable and real-time data to parents and schools.

I designed an iPad kiosk that helps teachers track kids’ daily eating habits and improves kids’ food choices based on their nutrition needs. It will help them achieve better long-term eating patterns while having fun.

User Research

To better understand kids’ needs and preferences, I read academic articles regarding kids nutrition and conducted interviews with teachers, parents, and a nutritionist. I quickly narrowed down specific pain points, which enabled me to develop a touch point that could motivate kids to engage in making healthier food choices.

Field studies and interviews

I visited 3 pre-schools, interviewed with 8 parents, 6 teachers, and 1 nutritionist. The teachers walked me through with their school’s meal system as well as students’ eating habits; it helped me in finding design opportunities.

Key Findings

Kids are highly emotional and easily affected by their peers, cartoon characters, and media. They would love to try new things and make their own choices. Therefore the key is how to motivate and influence a good eating habit.

Ideation

I designed an application that allows students to choose their meal based on their preference with two meal choices included: cartoon-theme nutritional meal and a self-guided option with voice support.

Device Chosen: IPad Kiosk

Target user: Preschool-aged kids (5-8) who are interested in games and touch screens, and know how to scroll, swipe, and navigate.

Location: School cafeteria/classroom

Technologies: AR Face Recognition, Voice Support Assistant

Design Highlights: Gamification in Education

• Colorful platform with cartoon characters will keep them engaged.

• Easy hands-on instructions simplify the process of customizing meal selection.

• Monitor and track daily nutrition intake instantly by school and parents

• Real-time assistant to motivate kids to make healthier food choices.

• Create a competitive game to reward individual and team achievement.

Prototyping and User Testing

I created a high fidelity prototype for kids because kids’ attention span is short and they like a variety of bright colors. I conducted user-testing on my friend’s 5-year-old daughter, Evelyn.

The goal of user testing:

• Identify if the flow is easy to navigate and use

• Determine the usability of the iPad kiosk, including learnability and efficiency

Feedback:

• Use more pictures and larger font size.

• Prefer icons over text and buttons

• Reduce steps and simplify the interaction

• Use stickers instead of numbers for score because kids cannot recognize large numbers

• Use voice guide to support

Design Iterations

Feedback of user testing is positive. Optimal use of color and graphics when designing digital applications for kids is important. Therefore, I used large icons instead of text buttons and enlarged pictures of food to encourage and engage kids to complete the task.

Design

Login Page/ Profile Page

By using facial recognition technology, it will be verified kids’ profile quickly. Each profile will have customized meal plan recommendations based on specific food allergies or dietary restrictions. Since kids might not be able to read at an early stage, voice support will be provided each step when kids make their selection.

Option 1 - Cartoon Nutritional Meal: Selina chooses her favorite cartoon character to select nutritionist recommended meals.

Option 2- Self-Guided Meal: She can choose her meal based on five nutritional values: fruits, veggies, protein, grains, and dairy. Voice guide available.

Self-Guided Meal Practice

Making learning fun!

Real Time Assistant

In some scenarios, if kids have not achieve certain nutrition, a real-time assistant will pop up to encourage the kids to make healthier food choices. For example below, if a kid repeatedly select cucumber in multiple days, then the system will suggest to select other veggies.

Rewards

Based on the nutrition fact of the existing food selection, the application will label star stickers for recommended ingredients. In this way, kids could earn point by following the suggested meal, which indirectly influence kids’ selection and cultivate a good eating habit. Students could compete in one classroom and earn rewards to redeem gifts. This largely increase kids’ motivation and participate the gamification education.

Future Steps

Let’s bring healthy meal plan to home!

What if parents receive daily food tracker from school, and suggestions for recipes and fun activities they can interact with their kids include grocery shopping and cooking challenges, would it be cool to reinforce the experience? The magic of this app is that it also engages kids and parents to connect, grow, learn, and have fun, enriching the communities we live in. My design is not only building a good diet for our kids but also help the entire family eat healthier.

Living in Smart

Daily/Weekly report: Learn about kids’ preferences and summarized eating habits with customized recommendations.

Discover: Explore nutrition recommendations, recipes, and other educational resources.

Community: Teacher-parent and parent-parent relationships are tightened up, forming a community network for suggestions, events, and questions.

Reflection

Design never ends

This was a very fun project where I was able to start from scratch and dive in an unknown filed, come up with the ideas using important UX methods. I enjoyed the design process and applied various methods for new design. I feel very excited for the opportunity to imagine myself as a product designer and how I can contribute the team to design creative and enjoyable products. The whole experience has opened my eyes to field through challenges and joys when I creating kids’ educational products.

What I learned:

• Let users help me arrive at the solutions with ease adaption.

• Think out of the box first and avoid bias, then check with users to meet the reality. 

• Keeping track of every possible state for every element was a challenge, I wish I could go back and give this important product stage a little more thought. Perhaps, I want to build a fun game for kids like a storytelling book without making them think too hard.

What’s the next step:

• Conduct research with other target groups, such as kids in different age and parents from various backgrounds.

• Do more usability testing and get data from target users

• Design a mobile app

• Improve accessibility and usability