Redesigning the NHS Food Scanner App
Background
The NHS Food Scanner app is a UK Government dietary app designed to provide feedback on the nutritional content of packaged foods to parents and their children. The app aims to encourage individuals to make healthier choices by implementing behaviour change techniques and visually showing how much sugar, saturated fat and salt is present in scanned items.
In this project (Feb 2024), I redesign the Food Scanner app to extend the government's mission of promoting healthier dietary choices and encourage users to go beyond food scanning to adopt healthier habits at home. Through UX design, the redesigned app aims to provide a holistic approach to health by empowering users to make informed food choices, discover nutritious recipes, and engage in challenges that promote healthier eating habits. By promoting a greater level of health and wellness within the home, the redesigned app contributes to improved overall health for individuals and their families.
The Problem
Challenges to healthy eating.
Factors such as the cost of living crisis, limited access to affordable food choices, and minimal education and nutritional knowledge pose challenges for many individuals seeking to make healthier eating habits as well as contributing to wider health inequalities.
Redesigning the NHS Food Scanner app can aim to address these challenges by empowering users with knowledge and support to overcome socioeconomic barriers and make sustainable healthy lifestyle changes within their means.
The Solution
To address the above challenges and encourage behaviour change towards healthier lifestyles, I created three new pages to enhance the current Food Scanner app:
Home page:
The home page is designed to provide users with a visual representation of their progress, with the aim of evoking a sense of accomplishment and motivation in the user.
The page also includes a “more to explore” section containing additional resources and information, empowering the user with knowledge to make healthier choices.
Challenge page:
The challenge page makes use of gamification techniques to motivate users to engage in healthy eating challenges - fostering a sense of accomplishment and accountability.
Users can also initiate new challenges based on national health campaigns (e.g. Veganuary) - catering to users’ diverse interests and goals.
Discover page:
The discover page caters to users’ diverse needs and interests by offering a curated selection of tips & tricks for healthy eating and general life care.
The page aims to provide practical guidance to incorporate healthier habits into daily routines, as well as serving as a valuable resource for users wishing to make sustainable changes to their lifestyle.
Measuring Success
To measure the success of the solutions I designed, the following metrics could be considered:
App reviews - reviewing user feedback can provide insights into the overall user experience of the app and help identify areas of improvement or additional features users feel should be added to the app.
User engagement – tracking metrics such as number of active users (e.g. daily or monthly), session duration, completed challenges and number of items scanned and swapped can show whether users are actively interacting with the app.