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CURRENT ¢ HEALTH + WELL BEING

Wear Me

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° The information must be easily accessible, ideally having at-a- glance info with an option for a more detailed view

» The information must be easy to understand; data visualiza- tions should be used to simplify and make tabular data

» The information and food selection criteria should be present- ed hierarchically to reduce cognitive load; this hierarchy could relate to the user’s unique goals or limits

» The app should give the option of searching for nearby restau- rants, highlighting those participating in the ID program

» Where applicable, the app should be able to push and pull food-related information to and from similar apps on a user’s smartphone

» The app itself should be friendly, providing the user with moments of delight to enhance the user experience and promote future use and interaction

After determining what was needed within our app solution, we then produced physical mockups. Creating paper prototypes before moving to a computer environment gave us something tangible to present to testers, to see if they understood the basic flow of the proposed system, while allowing us to remain ina revision headspace, unattached to a final solution. Feedback concerning our existing grid layout, features, and accessibility avenues informed changes we incorporated into the third iteration of our paper prototype.

Having completed final testing on this prototype, we are now prepared to address the visual design of our app. Our project part- ners at ID provided branding details for use in our visual design. While some of the colours and typefaces are suitable for printed material, certain design decisions must be made to ensure the final visual aesthetic for the app remains approachable, friendly, and legible. Analyzing and restructuring problem areas of the brand guidelines to apply to mobile devices will be addressed in the near future before final high-fidelity mockups are made.

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COMMENTARY

The use of co-creative methods and iterative design—allowing ideas to diverge and converge multiple times with the help of the people we are designing for—has greatly influenced our project’s development. We find ourselves with a far more refined and considered solution than what we would have been able to develop on our own. An additional benefit of co-creation is that the final design is more likely to be suited to the overall system and its users [5]. The value our solution intends to deliver extends from provid- ing nutritional information to assisting with the bigger picture of a person’s overall well being. The processes our project entailed demonstrate that, in the end, the product itself is not significant— the worth of the product lies in the value it can add to the lives of those who use it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank those who have contributed to this project: my project partner, Helena Levison, for her unique way of thinking and her gift of curiosity; my instructors, Haig Armen and Eugenia Bertulis, for their guidance and patience; and our project partners at Informed Dining, Heather Bretschneider, Lisa McKeller, and Regan Hansen, for the opportunity to work with them on a provin- cial initiative.

REFERENCES

Denmark Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries. The keyhole sym- bol, 2010. http://www. noeglehullet.dk/services/English/forside.html. Health Canada. Food and nutrition, 2012. http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/ index-eng.php. Healthy Families BC. Informed dining, 2012. https:// www.healthyfamiliesbc.ca/home/informed-dining/. Ideo. Human-cen- tered design toolkit, 2009. http://www.ideo.com/work/human-centered

-design-toolkit/ Sanders, E., & Stappers, P.J. Convivial toolbox: Genera- tive research for the front end of design. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers, 2012.