Plauxible - a digital application to drive plant-based adoption
How to support people to safely adopt more plant-based meals with confidence.
Project
Food & Drink Application
Role
Product Designer
Timeframe
5 weeks
Target User
Young professionals
Goal
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"Provide users with a digital platform that intuitively educates them about plant nutrition based on their unique needs, and integrates with a database of recipes that will satisfy those needs."
Overview
Why this project?
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Consuming plant-based myself and being part of online communities that help beginners answer questions about this lifestyle, I noticed a significant amount of anxiety towards safely adopting more plants into their meals.
Themes of frustration and confusion started to appear over time and I saw an opportunity to make these people's lives easier.
At a glance
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Upfront market research showed that the digital plant-based food & drink market has, so far, primarily focused on delivering services that address one single need, such as recipe databases, finding restaurants nearby or helping the user find food alternatives.
The plant-based food & drink market fails to lower the users’ concerns and anxiety of the full experience of adopting plant-based meals, from learning about plant nutrition to execution.
Plauxible will address this gap by serving as a personalized guide that is tailored to their specific needs. This service will lower the users’ anxiety/uncertainties towards adopting more plants into their meals by educating them about plant nutrition in an uncomplicated manner, and therefore saving valuable time spent endlessly researching.
Outline of this case-study
Define
Problem statement
User & Business goals
Discovery
Market Research
User Interviews
User Journey Mapping
Affinity Mapping
User Surveys
Design Goals
Connecting Insights With Solutions
Hypothesis Statement
Ideation & Testing
Sketching
Low-Fi Wireframes
High-Fi Prototype
Acquisition Strategy
Content Curation
Design System
Brand Design
Next steps
Goals
What does success look like?
For our users, success looks like a carefree and efficient start-to-end process, from research to execution.
For the business, reaching a 5% conversion rate on the landing page promotion. Since the main purpose of the first phase is measuring interest, this goal will update in the future.
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For the project, it’s designing a low-fidelity prototype to measure concept value and usability within 2 weeks. Then iterate on findings and improve to design a high-fidelity prototype in a 4-week timeline.
Discovery
The current competitive landscape fails to connect educational resources with the recipes they provide and fall short on providing the user with an actionable platform.
Evaluating 6 direct and indirect competitors painted a clear picture of the user Plauxible is trying to target, what needs were already being solved and how. This included products that focused on guiding people to transition to a plant-based lifestyle but also vegan meal plan, recipe and alternative calculator products. ​
Key insights
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All competitors offer an extensive recipe database equipped with advanced filters, ratings and reviews
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Their main audience is young professionals between 25-34 with are relatively short attention span for scientific articles
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None of the products above provide users with an easy way to take action with the incredibly detailed long-reads on nutrition. They fail to recognize the need for locating only what the user seeks based on their personal health concerns.
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Thus far, competitors have neglected the quality of the in-app experience, user interface and they lack brand identity
A large volume of people eat plant-based because of serious health issues, and this puts pressure on getting the nutritional balance right.
By talking to users, I was seeking to not only understand how and why they educate themselves on plant nutrition, but how it influences their approach to adopting this lifestyle.
I had the chance to video chat with 6 beginners who have started transitioning 1 to 4 weeks prior to the interview.
Learning goals
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What are their motives to eat more plants?
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How do they go about educating themselves, what do they use, when and where does it take place?
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What are their prioritized concerns about a plant-based diet?
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What influences their decision making?
Some key insights from these 6 interviews:
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5 out of 6 participants were frequently concerned about protein, despite having a moderate active office lifestyle. This was a sign of lacking fundamental knowledge about plant nutrition.
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None of the participants had go-to resources to learn about plant nutrition
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4 out of 6 participants ate more plant-based because of a disease or illness, like heart disease, obesity, high cholesterol and blood pressure.
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Despite the desire to eat whole-food plant-based, some participants claimed they would still eat meat to avoid deficiencies. They felt safer that way and weren’t motivated enough to read long articles about plant nutrition when meat would do the job
Whether it’s the 28-year-old nurse with an iron deficiency who has 44-hour work shifts, or the 36-year-old mother who seeks to break the obesity cycle in her family by raising her children on plants, they all seem to share a common roadblock. The switch is daunting and they aren’t sure where to start.
Designing for context is crucial for a product that impacts anxious users’ everyday activities.
These interviews allowed me to create an accurate journey map that helped me understand their locations, comfort levels, emotional states and people who influence this experience.
Users saw more value in maintaining a nutritional balance than convenience, but convenience wasn’t totally trivial.
The small sample size of 6 interview participants represented multiple personas and it wasn’t enough to defend a strategy. This called for a Likert scale survey to solidify and prioritize these findings. 78 survey participants helped me do just that.
Design goals
There’s a sea of information out there about plant nutrition, PlatBuddy will make it more accessible and actionable.
The anxiety we observed towards a plant-based lifestyle is a symptom of pressure and fear to get the nutritional balance right. On top of that, not having a simple guide to follow that is tailored to the individual which prompts immediate action, presents an opportunity to fill a fundamental gap in the market.
“We believe that plant-based adoption rates will increase if Plauxible can support users’ transition by offering them a simplified, tailored and actionable educational platform that boosts their confidence.
Ideation
Three interconnected features.
Recipe filters and simplified nutritional content aim to elevate pressure to eat balanced and the full connected cycle between features invites convenience, learning and action.
Education on plant nutrition
Recipes targeting nutrition
Tracking the balance
Offering the plant nutrition fundamentals categorized in common concerns with easy to conceive language. Information will be linked directly with an extensive recipe database, helping the user to explore and take immediate action.
An extensive library of recipes equipped with detailed nutritional info that connects to an advanced filter to target nutritional needs.
Helping users to learn and validate whether they’re improving and eating balanced. The tracker will be connected to the nutritional resources to create a full learning cycle between features.
Wire-frames
For newcomers to a plant-based diet, direct access to fundamentals of plant nutrition was most important.​
It was crucial to ensure simplicity in the designs for these fundamentals. Users with little knowledge about plant nutrition have to feel encouraged and invited to learn about this, not overwhelmed by information. Using a clean card design with recognizable language rather than nutritional jargon helped resonate with the users' feelings.
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Once users are confident they want to learn more about the subject, they can dive deeper into detailed content and get access to actionable content such as recipes or learn about foods related to the relevant subject.
Building on an educational feature, we could provide additional value with an interconnected recipe database.
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User research delivered insights on the priorities of plant-based beginners. Rather than focusing on cuisines in traditional recipes features, these filters and recipes target important nutrition in a plant-based diet.
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Making this information more accessible, but not reinventing the wheel, helped users focus on their goals of finding meals to eat balanced based on their unique needs.
The final step is to help users validate whether they're on the right track.
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How do I know if I'm doing a good job? A coach or manager is a common concept that lets you know what goes well and what doesn't. The tracker allows you to get that feedback and provide you with actionable guidance to improve.
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The manual input presents another opportunity to learn more about specific foods, but in an engaging manner.
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This feeds directly back into the educational feature and completes the cycle that increases the users' confidence in eating balanced on a plant-based diet.
A surprising amount of users were offering topic suggestions for the 'Not feeling well' category.
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Targeting a conscious community of individuals with unique allergies, experiences and needs, this results in many different forms of discomfort when transitioning to a plant-based diet. The challenge will be to acquire this diverse set of experiences and convert them into popular themes and topics. This will look like a user submission form in the early stage prototype.
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The direct connections between the provided for educational resources and recipe suggestions proved to be of value. It will be a core focus to make this part of the products as intuitive as possible.
Final user flow & prototype
View site map
With an MVP in place, it presents the ability to enter the acquisition phase and validate interest.
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The current prototype has only reached a handful of users but delivered meaningful insights about what has potential and what doesn't.
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With a clear direction on what to focus on, I will focus on the following next steps:
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Designing a landing page that will help validate user interest in this concept. I will be aiming at a 5% conversion rate at first
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Content for the educational 'Nutrition' feature will be curated and validated before implementation, followed by a provided list of credible resources from NCBI
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Creation of an onboarding process aiming to provide tailored content to the users.