The new Epinephrine/food scanner and an app that goes with it for allergic people - Rizdesign - riyaz - seattle - design - UX - UI - Industrial - product - designer - cad - solidworks - keyshot - rendering - 3d

Overview

This was a project that I did as a part my masters program at the University of Washington. The design process involved Surveys, Interviews, User testing, Wireframing, Concept Sketching, Low and high fidelity prototyping 3D modeling etc..

The final outcome was a new designed epinephrine that scans food and gives the user feedback along with an app that goes with it.

Design Problem

Food allergies and dietary restrictions, while common, are not always understood or accounted for. As such, the challenges of traveling and eating outside of one’s home can be difficult or even life-threatening, as it is often difficult to determine whether or not food on a menu will be safe to eat for those with severe food allergies.

Project Scope

The scope of our project was to demonstrate the following:

Project declaration and definition of the design question: “How can we help travelers with significant food allergies or dietary restrictions enjoy their travel destinations and vacations in a safe way?”

Performing user research to define key personas in the design of our application

Ideation and sketching of our design

Low- and high-fidelity prototyping of the design based on feedback obtained through usability testing

Major Design Decisions

We began with a number of predefined assumptions:

Travelling abroad creates significant challenges for people with food allergies

Target users would be primarily interested in a “Yelp-like” experience in choosing restaurants & meals

Our user research validated that these assumptions were broadly correct, however we learned that:

Eating out locally, or at a chain, can also be challenging

People with severe food allergies are more interested in an accurate assessment of the food ingredients than in any kind of social experience

People who suffer from food allergies expressed a common concern about embarrassment.

Based on these learnings, we chose to do the following:

Design a handheld food scanner that would [1] be accurate for severe allergy sufferers, [2] look “cool” for people who don’t want to be embarrassed by carrying a clunky EpiPen around

Optimize the app for a social experience so that users with less severe allergies could “play along”

Include the ability to view common chain restaurants (Starbucks, e.g.) for “safe” menu choices