Eric BellA project at the Health 2.0 Code-a-thon: HealthE Habits.
Everyone assumes food data
Many services track, analyze, or visualize a user’s diet information. (175 in the App Store alone on last count.) They design triggers, rewards, and gamified feedback loops to encourage behavior. But they force the user to slog through repetitive typing tasks. On their phone. Every time they eat something.
Food entry blows
Typing in food data on mobile is terrible experience. It’s a consistent pain point across all manual food entry tasks. There are many shortcuts to reduce typing…but they are still workarounds. Because food is complicated.
Our hackathon project
We sought to eliminate typing altogether. Rather than augmenting typed input, we use those same shortcuts (previous behavior, food data APIs) to allow much simpler interactions, via contextual lists, photographs, and voice input.
