🌱 Designing an AI-Powered Experience that Makes Healthy Eating Fun
Lentil is a nutrition SaaS that allows users to scan meals for personalized insights, nutrition facts, and healthier food swaps. The project aimed to evolve Lentil from MVP to a polished, engaging product by establishing a cohesive visual identity and refining the overall user experience based on beta user feedback. The experience introduced light gamification to motivate consistent healthy habits, improve long-term engagement.
🎯 Goals & Metrics
Evolve this MVP into a polished brand & UI
How: Complete UI refresh, build a scalable component library, align design system with brand voice.
Metric: Increase user satisfaction and task efficiency by 25% after implementation.
Increase user engagement
How: Introduce light gamification elements, challenges, streaks, and rewards to motivate healthy habits.
Metric: Boost daily interactions & repeat visits by 20%
Reduce friction & improve usability
How: Conduct a UX audit and redesign the dashboard layout with clearer visual hierarchy and prioritized content.
Metric: Increase feature discoverability and reduce the number of clicks or scrolling required to access key features.
+25%
User Satisfaction
+20%
Engagement Goal
-20%
Less Clicks
🧠 Key Problems to Solve
During usability testing, several friction points emerged that were negatively impacting the user experience and overall engagement:
Excessive Clicks to Access Core Features – Users struggled to quickly access the "Meal & Menu Scan" feature, requiring multiple taps to reach it. This created unnecessary friction in the primary flow of the app, impacting user satisfaction.
Hidden Nutrition Goals – Users’ selected nutrition goals were obscured behind a small, unclear icon at the top of the screen. This made it difficult for users to verify or adjust their goals, leading to confusion and potential misalignment with personalized recommendations.
Lack of Icon Clarity and Labeling – Several key actions and navigation elements relied on ambiguous icons without labels, causing hesitation and errors during task completion. Users expressed uncertainty about the function of certain buttons, which impacted overall usability and confidence in the app.
💡 Solutions
To address the usability challenges, I implemented a series of targeted design improvements that enhanced clarity, accessibility, and engagement:
Optimized Profile Section: Made user nutrition goals visible at a glance and introduced gamified elements like level units to increase motivation and engagement.
Simplified Access to Core Features: Broke apart the "Menu" & "Meal" Scan buttons on the dashboard, ensuring users could reach this primary feature in a single click while respecting engineering constraints for camera prompts.
Redesigned Challenges Section: Created a cleaner, more visually appealing layout to make challenges easier to discover and participate in.
Improved CTA Buttons: Redesigned call-to-action buttons to reduce friction, increase clarity, and support smoother interactions.
Reorganized Dashboard Layout: Adjusted the dashboard hierarchy and layout so recipes are immediately visible, prioritizing high-value content and improving first-glance usability.
Enhanced Iconography: Added labels and refined icons according to UX best practices to eliminate confusion and improve overall usability.
These updates collectively streamlined the user journey, improved discoverability of key features, and created a more engaging, intuitive, and visually appealing experience.
