Taste Buds

Inspiration

The idea for Taste Buds was inspired by the millions of people who experienced loss of smell and taste after COVID-19 and other illnesses. For many, this loss affects much more than food—it changes daily experiences, from enjoying meals to sensing familiar smells that bring comfort and memories. Research and personal stories revealed that this sensory loss can also impact emotional well-being, making recovery feel frustrating and isolating.

We also discovered that the most common recovery method, olfactory training, often lacks feedback and motivation for users. This led us to ask: what if smell recovery could be interactive, measurable, and encouraging? Taste Buds was created to transform the recovery process into a guided and engaging experience that helps people rebuild their senses and reconnect with flavor.

What it does

Taste Buds is a sensory recovery system designed to help people retrain their sense of smell and restore flavor perception after illness or injury. It pairs a smart nasal strip that delivers targeted aroma stimulation with a companion mobile app that guides users through scent-based exercises.

The app tracks olfactory receptor activity and visualizes progress through features like flavor detection exercises, taste sensitivity heatmaps, and training history. By turning traditional smell training into an interactive and trackable experience, Taste Buds helps users stay motivated while gradually rebuilding their ability to smell and fully experience flavor again.

How we built it

FigmaMake built the ground for which we started on. We then researched on creative visual ways we could incorporate medical information without an overload of text. We took inspiration from heatmaps and gardens to showcase our data, creating animated components for users to interact throughout the app.

Challenges we ran into

FigmaMake took some time learning. We had to learn the proper prompts to teach it what we intended, and even then there was a lot of trial and error. Breaking certain cards and components proved difficult as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Half of the team was not familiar with Figma. We were proud to be able to fully build a fun and interactive app with the limited knowledge that we did have. We all pushed ourselves in uncomfortable territory, and accomplished great things in the end.

What we learned

FigmaMake is just the start to our design process. It can provide simple inspiration, but we as designers need to incorporate and work more on our design process without an emphasis on its uses.

What's next for Weast Coast

We would love to explore more animated concepts. Medical information is difficult to communicate to the general public, thus it would be interesting to see how we could turn heavy information into other creative graphics.