NourishNow

Inspiration

Seeing my family members suffer through a silent epidemic–diabetes–inspired me to educate and spread awareness on nutrition, especially to children. When things sound too good to be true, they probably are, but the prevention of diabetes is one of those rare cases when it isn’t. Having the proper knowledge on nutrition and applying it is how we save ourselves from taking medicine for the rest of our lives and escape the hold this epidemic has on the world. My intent was for children to be aware of how food affects us and why it’s so important to have a balanced diet.

What it does

NourishNow is an app that aims to simplify nutrition. It includes lessons on the different food groups, macronutrients and micronutrients, and what each one does for us, along with the molecular structures of foods. To make this information practical, the user can see what foods fall under these groups and a recipe to accompany it. If the user has a specific ingredient in mind, the search feature allows them to look up the nutrient profile of that food and explore recipes utilizing it. Now that we know what to eat, how much of it should we have? The app’s portion control guide helps the user navigate what portions look like for different foods. Users can also be kept accountable through the macro tracker feature, which rewards them with a badge every time they balance a meal.

How we built it

• Figma for the prototype
• Canva for the pitch deck
• Loom for recording the demo

Challenges we ran into

One challenge I ran into was making the information visually appealing. I originally had a lot of information that I wanted to include but it made the app look messy and overfilled. I realized how that's not realistic for an app, so I spent a good amount of time deciding between what I wanted to keep and what was actually important. I also struggled with making the app more interactive and not just loads of information on a few pages, cause that's really boring.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I originally had a lot of ideas for this project but I wasn't sure I would be able to implement all of them in the given time frame. I'm really happy that most of the ideas made it on the app. This also gave me an opportunity to combine my favorite fields, UI design and nutrition together, which made it enjoyable to work on. Creating a balanced plate with the user's choice of foods was a design I was proud of adding because most nutrition focused apps place more importance on numbers and grams consumed rather than the important role of every food and what they do for us.

What we learned

As a beginner hacker, I learnt how to design and create an app prototype on Figma. Apart from developing my research and pitching skills, I was also able to broaden my knowledge on nutrition and diabetes for the pitch deck.

What's next for NourishNow

As for the future, I am going to be focusing on learning about app development and turn this prototype into a real app. I would love for people to learn about nutrition and why it's so important to be aware and knowledgeable about it. To make it more diverse, I'll be updating the database on foods to add in the macro tracker to make the app more accessible to people across the world. Along with this, gamification elements like nutrition challenges, quizzes, and achievements, will be a useful feature to to keep users engaged and motivated in their learning journey.

Built With

• canva
• figma
• loom