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Nutristyle Website Redesign

Modernizing and streamlining a website for an AI-powered meal planner in order to educate and engage new users.

 

Background Information

Project Scope

Redesign a cohesive website that properly informs users of what NutriStyle is and increase signups. Also cater towards potential future business partners to join a growing software platform.

What is NutriStyle?

A nutrition software solution powered by AI that seeks to connect users with both their physicians and their local grocer to create weekly customizable meal plans.

My Role

I was in charge of research and usability testing for this project. My research strategy involved recruiting a large number of participants for various surveys and interviews, and then taking that data alongside the secondary research I conducted and synthesizing it into actionable insights for the rest of my team and the client.

RESOURCES AND TOOLS

Sketch, Illustrator, Flinto, Google Forms, Zoom, SimilarWeb

SPRINT LENGTH

3 weeks

Problem

NutriStyle currently has a low-functioning website that does not accurately educate or engage new users about its product.

Solution

By creating a new style guide and sign-up process while redesigning NutriStyle’s website, we will achieve higher user engagement for our product. We will know this to be true when we see increased sign-up numbers and user retention.

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REACHING OUT

As researcher, one of the first things I began doing was to send out screeners for possible health-affected individuals for which NutriStyle would be a helpful solution for. I was looking mostly to interview these individuals to see how what sort of things would stand out to them, with the initial assumption that they may already currently be using some sort of health/fitness software solution and would need to be coerced away from what they are currently using. I also attempted to contact multiple nutritionists to get a good idea of how NutriStyle might partner with them and to see how the client flow from health professional to user might work.

While we were responsible solely for the website and not the app in and of itself, this information helped us generate a stronger idea of the demographic that we wanted to cater towards. We then conducted a large battery of surveys on what people wanted to see on informational websites, and got a lot of opinions on homepage layouts.

Background Research

As part of my background research to better understand the client service that I would be revamping the website for, I looked into NutriStyle’s features and searched for competitors. The client provided a slide deck for potential investors that claimed that they had no direct competition, which was true in the sense that there does not seem to be any other company seeking to create a meal planning app that linked the customer to both grocer and physician.

However, meal-planning apps themselves are a dime a dozen and there were plenty of health/nutrition app softwares on the market that could be looked at for the non-logistic side of the competition - I decided mostly to look at the top-rated apps Yummly, MyFitnessPal, and Lifesum.

As NutriStyle also brands itself as an AI-powered nutrition solution, I decided to also look into the big data/artificial intelligence side of potential competitors. For artificial intelligence, Nutrino is doing many of the same things on a business-to-business level while having good search results for ‘AI nutrition software.’ And there were quite a few big data nutrition companies offering customized meal plans (although at a fairly expensive rate) using DNA test kits to match genetic information with meal preferences - one of the better-matching ones we found being Habit, a company that follows up on that premise by sending you your groceries through AmazonFresh directly afterwards. Again, while not true competitors, they are certainly still in the ‘customized meal-planning software’ space that NutriStyle is competing in, even if the way they go about it is different.

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Competitive Analysis

Using the above research to establish a good idea of who might be competing for NutriStyle’s potential clients, I then created a mini-site audit comparison table to get a good idea of the layouts of those competitor websites. By mapping out what elements people wanted to see in an informational website to where they were on the websites, I could pick out common trends and investigate further into any deviations.


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Web Analytics

I then also decided to look up the website analytics of some of these sites using a service called SimilarWeb. By cross-referencing this with the web element comparison table I made, I could start to make more informed insights about how differently placed elements might affect user retention rate, bounce rate, and length of time spent on the website. Of course, website analytic sites can be fickle and not always truly representative of actual user behavior, but they certainly can serve to reinforce previous findings.

The premier example would be of Lifesum, who had an extraordinarily high bounce rate and much lower user browsing time than its competitor websites, losing 70% of its browsers within the first minute compared to the ~45% of MyFitnessPal and Yummly who also held users for significantly longer. When cross-referenced with the feature table, we saw that Lifesum didn’t explain what actual features it provided on the landing page, instead just talking about its benefits and some app download statistics.

Affinity Map

Combining all of the above competitive analysis with all the interview data, we had a large amount of data that I needed to sift through for key actionable insights for my team to work with. I did an affinity map exercise to help sift and categorize all the things people said by similarity, to see what sorts of trends emerged.

Insights

The insights that we gathered from all the research data collected to this point are as follows:

  • The website needs a large and clear call to action, alongside an explanation of what NutriStyle offers

  • People don’t trust positive text testimonials, even if they value seeing them - video and/or third-party curation would be optimal

  • Appealing to authority is important - for a nutrition-based service, being endorsed by a dietitian raises trust

  • An explanation of the AI needs to be carefully worded because glossing over technical details can lower trust of the service

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Design Work

Using the insights gathered from my research, we then began crafting the prototype website designs that would optimize new client inflow. Supplemented by branding research from our branding strategist and revised content from our content manager, our interaction designer hashed out several iterations of a new website layout, along with a new logo that more accurately matched the service and tone our team was going for in the redesign. While not conducting usability tests, I helped sound out many of my team members’ ideas and task flows.

Usability Testing

During the iterative cycle of improving our design, I conducted usability tests to gather information on what we could improve on our current design at the time. As our new website design was streamlined to strip away much of the extraneous fluff elements of the original website, the tasks were fairly simple:

Figure out what NutriStyle is and what it offers.

Go through the signup process.

Do you have any feedback for any other elements?

Using System Usability Scale scores as a metric to track improvement, we iterated on our design three times during the sprint. There was a confusing placeholder in our high-fidelity prototype design that severely dropped the overall score of our final user-tested prototype that has been fixed in the final design - it was great to get some last-minute actionable feedback and I am confident that had we had time to do another usability test, our final design would have been another tick upwards in our average scores.

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NEXT STEPS

For a continuation of our project, we would of course be interested in iterating more times. The additional things that I would want to focus on my end would be to get additional research from the business side - I would want to attempt to interview hospital and grocery managers to figure out what else we could do to spruce up the partners page. More research into health-concerned individuals would be helpful as I didn’t get as many interviews for those as I would have liked. I would also be very interested in interviewing dietitians and seeing how that would be different from nutritionists, as I was previously unaware of the difference between the two occupations until it was brought up in a survey result.

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