Project Details
Deliverables
UX Research
Secondary research synthesis, mind map + flow
and 4 user interviews
Wireframes
Worked with a design team of 4 to create high fidelity product
High Fidelity Prototype
High Fidelity responsive prototypes for application launch
Nom Nomz is an app for food and meal prepping. Students often prioritize convenience over nutrition due to time, budget, and campus options. Current trends include meal prepping, plant-based diets, and food delivery, amid ongoing food insecurity. In response, NomNomz is a social media app that allows students to share their favorite meals with other students.
Nom Nomz is an app for college students, made by college students.
🍽️ Nom Nomz aims to help students:
College students often lack the time, resources, and cooking knowledge to meal prep consistently. This leads to unhealthy habits, food waste, and overspending. We derived the problem from our own experiences, and from the lived experiences of other students that we interviewed.
❌Problem
💡Our Solution
Nom Nomz is a social media app where college students can share their favorite recipes, explore new meals from peers, and build a supportive meal prepping community. Powered by AI recommendation systems, supervised learning, and rule-based logic, Nom Nomz offers intelligent meal suggestions, personalized filters, and flexible scheduling—making meal prepping easier, smarter, and more fun for students.
💻 Development
Nom Nomz was created by 4 students at the University of Texas at Austin. In the span of 4 weeks, we collected primary research, secondary research, created a design system, co-created 20+ wireframes, and created a high-fidelity prototype.
So… what was my primary role in the team?
While we were all involved in the process of building the app, certain members took control of certain areas based on their expertise. My main role was designing and building our AI chatbot Chef Whisker, and training an image based algorithm to recognize and scan the user's food.
🔎 Primary + Secondary Research
To begin, we collaborated on a Miro board to give us space to map out all of our ideas and gather our research.
Tip: Use + and - in the bottom right corner to Zoom in and out, and hold and drag your mouse to move around the board.
CLICK ME TO VIEW MIRO IN THIS WINDOW
Secondary Research Synthesis
On the Miro, we have all of our secondary research points and insights that we gathered by reading papers based over the following themes: Accessibility, Social, Environmental, Health, Time, and Tech. After gathering these insights, we concluded that there is 8 overarching themes. We then at the bottom added the questions that we had based on the research we conducted.
Secondary Research Mind Map
We then simplified our synthesis and created a mind map to make all of the information more digestable.
Primary Research
For our primary research, we conducted four Zoom interviews where we asked the following questions to the participants. All participants are students at the University of Texas at Austin.
Questions
Can you walk me through a typical day? What are your daily meal habits?
Do you prefer cooking alone, with friends, or eating out? What influences your decision?
What motivates you to cook at home? Can you give an example?
What are the biggest challenges you face when it comes to meal planning, grocery shopping, or cooking?
How do you currently find new recipes or meal ideas? What platforms, apps, or tools do you use?
What are the biggest reasons you choose not to cook?
What is one thing you think could help you meal prep or have better nutrition?
If you had help, what is one specific thing you would ask for regarding meal prep or nutrition?
Answer Summaries
Below are the summaries of our participants answers which we condensed by reading over the live transcripts we recorded.
🧠Brainstorming For App Features
📊 Design System
🔑 Key Features of Design System
😄 Gen Z Style
Bright and fun color palette that is high in saturation.
🔤 Youthful Typeface
Neo-grotesque typeface that blends form with function, it's legible but also has flare.⚪Rounded Shapes
Rounded shapes and iconography that is playful, yet functional and intuitive.
📱Final Product
Main features for each page of NomNomz are:
🏠 Home Screen
⇢ Easy AI assistance on the dashboard (Thank you Chef Whisker!)⇢ Calendar with meal plan for the day
⇢ Updates from friend's and their meals for the day
👤 User Profile
⇢ Post and share recipes (AI can offer tips step by step of the recipe)⇢ Customizable profile
🤖 AI Assistant Chef Whisker
⇢ Talk to Chef Whisker for any help you may need⇢ Chef Whisker can suggest meals based on factors such as food, amount of time, etc.
✅ For You Page
⇢ Get recommendations that align with your food goals⇢ Find user's on the app that share interests / explore new foods from other users
📷 Meal Scanner
⇢ Using our computer vision technology, scan in items from your fridge and discover recipes⇢ Scan meals to discover their nutritional facts with summaries created by AI
👾 Coding The Food Scanner
Using Teachable Machine, I used the image recognition model to train the algorithm. I took pictures of two variables, grilled chicken chef salad and cereal to train the model for the meals. For the fridge scan portion, my variables were raspberries, and cottage cheese. After the model was reading accurately with high percentages, I used the tensor js template on teachable machine to load the model into p5.js. Then, I used some code to enhance the style by adding text that displayed the model labels (the food labels). I also made the code IOS compatible so that you could use your phone's back camera.
Model being trained on Teachable Machine.
🚶Takeaways
Utilize AI to create an user experience that is simple, digestable, and effective.
Translating AI into intuitive design
Spending longer in the research process is going to save you so much time later.
By understanding your problem statement and audience, creating a solution for them is going to be more comprehensive.
Take time to collect research
Stay on top of the trends
Following trends will help your app reach a broader audience, and engage users.