Contents

Case study · 2023

NutriHealth

A nutrition app for college students, built from the problem I was living

Maintaining a healthy diet as a college student often feels overwhelming with a busy schedule. Many of my friends and I relied on fast food, skipped meals, or felt unmotivated to make healthier choices. I surveyed 50 students, interviewed 16 of my peers, and designed NutriHealth around the three things that actually stopped them.

My impact

From naming why students give up to designing the thing that keeps them going.

Design process

Research, design, iteration.

Hover a stage to see what it involved

The problem

College students struggle to maintain healthy eating habits

A survey of 50 students and interviews with 16 peers surfaced the same four obstacles, none of them about knowing what healthy eating is.

And three challenges the design had to hold at once

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Research phase

Competitive analysis

Existing apps fell short on affordability, time, and connection

Three of the apps students already had on their phones, each strong at one part of the problem and silent on another.

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User research

I interviewed 16 of my peers

Fifty survey responses set the shape of the problem; sixteen interviews explained it. I mapped what students said, thought, did and felt to find where the habit actually broke.

The interview question protocol — The interview protocol, kept the same across all sixteen conversations.

Says, thinks, does, feels empathy map from the interviews — Says, thinks, does, feels: the map that turned sixteen transcripts into three themes.

What the survey said

Affinity map

Clustered from the survey responses, the interviews and the app review: what actually stopped a student from eating well.

Major insights

Three themes, and the design challenge each one set.

Design phase

How might we

How can we simplify meal planning, encourage better eating habits, and create a community around food amongst busy college students?

Ideation

From paper sketches to a full screen library

Onboarding, home, recipe and food logging, drawn in grey first so the decisions stayed about hierarchy and effort rather than colour.

Hand-drawn and greyscale wireframes for onboarding, home, recipe, and food logging — Low-fidelity mockups for the four core flows.

High fidelity NutriHealth screens and the full Figma screen library — The high-fidelity screen library that came out of them.

Iteration

Trade-off: browsing-first home screen vs action-first home screen

Adding Today's Progress created a clearer path from intention to action.

Design system

Poppins, a soft green palette, and two vegetable companions

A warm, low-contrast palette so tracking reads as encouragement rather than a deficit, with a carrot and an onion carrying the personality so the interface itself can stay quiet.

NutriHealth design system: Poppins typography, green colour scheme, app icon, and characters

Final design

Three features that turn intention into routine

Each feature answers one of the three themes directly: a planner for accessibility, accountability partners for habit formation, and daily logging for awareness.

Final design · live

The prototype, running in the page

The demo runs itself. Hover the phone to stop it and try the screen yourself.

Reflection

Habits are designed, not willed.

NutriHealth started as my own problem and ended as a system for it. The most useful thing I learned was that the barrier was rarely knowledge; it was effort, timing and the absence of anyone noticing.