OVERVIEW: ‘Health Manager’ is LG India's first smart refrigerator UI that enriches lives by enabling healthier and happier living for families. The aim of this project was to establish LG as a brand ‘that cares’. The growing concern over high obesity rate in Indian middle class paved the path for a product designed using health as a platform.
CONCEPTUALISATION:
Our design goal was to create a family-centric planning tool that monitors daily food consumption based on BMI goals and tracks progress in a simple and playful manner. We were conscious about creating a visually calm environment, rather than producing stress with constant overdue notifications or pop-ups. In line with this thought, various information structures and navigation patterns were explored. This helped lay down the foundation for the information architecture, navigation architecture and wireframes.
USER RESEARCH:
We conducted rapid user research through multiple rounds of in-depth interviews and observation studies to uncover insights around food consumption and healthy lifestyle. In parallel, we ran a usability study within the organisation by assigning few employees to use existing web/mobile health apps. This helped generate and prioritise features for our application. We also brought a food nutritionist on board to create a nutrition database for popular Indian food items and healthy Indian recipes.
UI METAPHOR: The interface was based on a UI metaphor: ‘The Indian Thali’. A typical thali (platter) comprises of one main dish along with various side dishes. This related to one main feature in the system (Health Manager) and various sub applications (photo gallery, audio/video recipes and calendar). Minimal layers of navigation, flat structure and priority grouping were derived from this metaphor. Understanding the role of ‘a mother’ who takes charge of family health, this interface was designed to empower one key user to track multiple profiles.
PROTOTYPING & TESTING: Low fidelity visual prototypes helped us extract deficiencies and suggest improvements to refine the content and design of our application. The second phase of user testing was on an actual touch screen with Android native UI design. The final prototype was tested using a screen with actual tech specs installed on a full-scale refrigerator mockup. Due to cost parameters, the screen was resistive touch. Hence all UI interactions were designed to be touch and tap based rather that drag or swipe based.
KEY LEARNINGS:
This was the first UX project handled by our team in the India Design Center and it helped me as the project manager establish UX and UI practices in an industrial design department. It gave me exposure of the various roles played by UI, ID and R&D teams in tandem to deliver an engaging interactive solution.
NEXT STEPS:
As project manager, I teamed up with a UI designer to execute this project from research till final prototype. The final UI concept was handed over to our HQ team in Seoul, South Korea to implement based on LG GUI guidelines and integrate into product roadmap for manufacturing.