This UX audit or UX analysis is an inspection of the Daily Dozen App — a nutrition app focused on building healthy eating habits instead of counting calories.
Responsibilities
UX research
UX and UI analysis
Final report
Project Context
Done in a 5-day sprint using Jake Knapp’s method (May 2023)
Solo side project
A project dedicated to nutritionfacts.org — a nonprofit organization dedicated to presenting the public with the results of the latest in peer-reviewed nutrition and health research presented in a way that is easy to understand.
Tools
I used Figma, FigJam, Photoshop, Miro and Google Sheets to research, set up, perform, deliver and present the audit.
The App
Dr. Greger's Daily Dozen app started out as a companion app to his book How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease. The book is a New York Times bestseller and the app is largely popular amongst its readers.
The app evolved after the publishing of Dr. Greger’s second book — weight loss mode and historical data options were added with the latest update.
These are the main screens of the app as of May 2023:
The Goals
Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen is a fantastic app for people who are not only watching their weight but also on a mission to improve their overall health through their eating habits.
Whereas most apps are focused on counting calories no matter what you eat (quantity), this app is a unique science-backed guide on how to add more plants to your menu (quality), no matter what diet you follow and how much you eat.
In short, it focuses on the quality of your food not just the quantity of it.
The app has 500k+ downloads on the Play Store and 10.5k on the App Store. It also maintains an excellent 4.9 rating on both platforms.
Overall, there isn’t anything wrong with the app other than the fact that users unfamiliar with Dr. Greger’s work might find the experience confusing and unsatisfactory.
To find out ways to improve the app for them and, as a consequence, for all users, this audit is focused on the following specific tasks:
Check for accessibility issues
Go through a heuristic evaluation and make sure the app follows the best accessibility practices available.
Ensure design consistency across the app
Ensure the app uses a design system, guide, design patterns, etc. suitable for the platform, brand, and industry.
Address user issues
Figure out which are the most often voiced user issues and address them in the most holistic way possible.
Improve microcopy
Ensure the app uses language easy to understand by people familiar with Dr. Greger’s books, as well as by people who are simply looking to improve their health.
These are the specific goals of this audit. However, there is an overall purpose for doing this audit in the first place:
What does success mean for this app?
This is a non-profit open-source project so monetary success isn’t an immediate consideration. However, the mission of the nonprofit organization is “to inspire and empower people to adopt lifestyle habits to better enjoy longer, healthier lives”.
Success for this app means more people using it daily and adopting a plant-centered diet and lifestyle. This means the goal of this audit is to help us look for ways to gain new users while keeping the high rating of the app.
Even though this can be seen mainly as a marketing effort, there might be specific design improvements and tweaks that might result in higher download rates by a broader target audience.
The Data
Reviews
After going through the app reviews, several themes began to emerge:
Users were happy with the simplicity of the app
Non-readers didn’t know where to start
Some accessibility options were suboptimal
A note-taking option was the most requested feature by users from all review groups
The Two Personas
The current target audience is people who have read the books by Dr. Michael Greger. However, it is clear from the reviews that not all people who download and want to use the app have read them.
This is why there are two personas. Even if someone has not read the books and doesn’t follow a plant-based diet, they can still benefit greatly by adding more whole plants to their plate.
Persona #1: Mike
Eats a whole food plant-based diet
came to it after a health scare a few years back
has read the books and follows Dr. Greger online
uses the app to cover his bases every day
Persona #2: Sam
describes herself as flexitarian
is mindful of her diet and tries to eat healthier
hasn’t read the book
uses the app to add more vegetables and color to her diet
Competitors
The app doesn’t have any direct competitors. As mentioned before, the vast majority of food and nutrition apps focus on counting calories and keeping track of the quantity of food eaten.
The indirect ones are MyNetDiary, MFitnessPal, and Cronometer. None of them are completely free but they have some free beginner options. They are often used together with the Daily Dozen app.
Information Architecture
The app started out as a simple but powerful checklist. After the publishing of Dr. Greger’s second book, a second checklist was added as a link without any explanation of what it is and why it is there. This made the app confusing for new and non-reader users.
Here is the app IA right now:
The Audit
I performed the audit according to the plan I set out for it last time. You can read more about it here:
Audit Categories
The checklist I created focused on the goals above and had five categories:
Heuristics
UI Design
Interactions & IA
Content
Accessibility
The Checklist
The audit checklist is an excellent tool for a quick, yet thorough evaluation of a product or service. I created a custom one using the resources I found during my research last week, including the five categories above.
The Findings
After going through each point of the checklist and recognizing the app issues, I mapped them out on each screen.
The Recommendations
Not all issues are equally important so after they are all presented visually, they need to be evaluated. I gave each issue a severity and “fixability” score:
Next Steps
I contacted the creators and main contributors to this open-source project and I’m looking forward to contributing to the project in any way I can.
Conclusion
Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen app is a fantastic tool for anyone who is looking to improve their overall health. It does its job well enough and with some improvements can become one of the leading nutrition apps out there.