Created by students for students, Nooch is an application with the goal to help students create better eating habits throughout their busy college days.
From our own experience, we have both gone through the issues with balancing our social life on top of school and homework, but something that is never spoken about is the neglect students have on their proper eating habits. Through stress and finding time to socialize and take breaks, we can forget something necessary to not only our health but our minds and focus, food.
Full case study found on Medium.
nooch
Marina Sepe and Grace Alderman
Art Direction: Courtney Spencer
BRANDING
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UX/UI
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BRANDING • UX/UI •
College is busy- between classes, homework, internships and jobs, extracurriculars, and finding the time to have a social life and rest, priorities are bound to get skewed. Taking the time to properly nourish your body should be at the top of the list of priorities, but most of the time it becomes the last of our concerns. Without affordable, nutritious, and available options, students reach for whatever is quickest or don’t reach for anything at all, creating inconsistent eating habits. Eating is directly tied to performance and mental stamina which is imperative as a college student.
As students ourselves, we’ve seen first hand how challenging it is to manage our time and eating habits. Anything that takes away from time to get work done feels like wasted time, even when it is something as important as fueling our bodies.
We took on the challenge of creating a solution to this issue utilizing our skills in UX/UI design.
We found that the major problem in students, specifically college kids, is having a hard time balancing proper eating during their busy school schedules. Balancing social lives and school can be overwhelming and in that state students are either led to less fulfilling options or none at all and just skipping meals. This results poorly for the students not only in overall heath but in academic performance. Inadequate nutrition and intake can lead to fatigue, impaired decision-making, slow you down, lead to a shorter temper or even stress and depression. We were seeking to create more nutritious food that is accessible, affordable, and sustainable. We did secondary research through polling students as well as a competitor analysis of similar applications.
SOLUTION
An app that tracks the user’s eating habits with their class schedule and creates a plan with reminders and recommendations of where and how to fuel up.
HOW NOOCH WORKS
Download the app and sign up
Take our “Goals and Preferences” survey
Allow notifications, or “nudges”
Sync your calendar and allow nooch to suggest an eating plan specific to you
Feel more in control of your eating habits with the guilt-free check-ins and helpful “nudges” from nooch!
For the name and logo, wanted to create a positive connection between the user and the app while promoting the app’s goal. We brainstormed a variety of catchy words based around health, food, and nutrition before landing on nooch. Easy to pronounce and easy to remember, nooch puts a fun spin on nutrition- exactly our goal with this app.
To avoid the obvious cliches when it comes to food iconography (fork and knife, chef’s hat, etc.) we decided to create a typographic logo solution. This way, our brand was able to stand as a strong and unique asset of it’s own, not be reliant on others as a crutch to understand who we are and what this app “makes” you do.
NAME AND LOGO
Once the user flow was finalized, it was time to sketch out our paper prototypes. We created several drafts of the prototypes, focusing more heavily on the user experience. Our design process was influenced by peer reviews and our competitor analysis, such as creating the homepage as a dashboard with the calendar listed. Once finalized we began working on wireframes in Figma. Having the flow of our app sorted out before beginning the wireframe process allowed us to focus more on the UI in the digital space, as well as clean up our current prototype and get a feel for the visual design choices.
After multiple drafts, we came to the end of the app design process with a final result we truly love, backed by research and branded in a way that inspires the user to build healthy habits guilt-free.
College is full of firsts, and for many it is the first time students are tasked with fueling themselves without help. Nooch creates the opportunity to create healthy habits that will benefit students in both their everyday life and in the long run through daily check-ins and custom meal plans to stay on track.
Working as a team of two created new opportunities and challenges neither of us had encountered before. Throughout the process we learned how to collaborate and bring our personal skill sets to the table to create an app we both love and are proud of. Creating with UX/UI at the forefront provided a new perspective that we will both take with us into future projects.
Link to full Medium article here.