6AM Health App

The Project

Today, many people making food choices find themselves trading between convenience and health: that is, they find they must choose between (i) slow, high-effort, high-health options and (ii) fast, low-effort, low-health options. Most often, people choose the latter. Even those who want to eat more healthily find that the current healthy alternatives are too time- or effort-consuming to conveniently fit in their busy schedules. Our question: how might we provide more convenient access to healthy food for busy people?

6AM Health strives to make delicious, fresh, and nutritious food convenient, affordable, and accessible to all. They have recently transitioned from early-morning home deliveries to a vending machine or “Fresh Fridge” distribution as their products have exploded in popularity.

Recognizing that people most often eat what is conveniently available to them, 6AM Health wants to make the Fresh Fridge solution even more convenient by building an app that will allow them to reserve and purchase product in the Fridge ahead of time. Eventually, the app will also serve as an engagement platform, giving users a reason to keep coming back through rewards and loyalty programs, building an interactive educational and motivational community of daily active users.

In March-June 2019 I worked with 6AM Health founder and CEO Brad Callow, along with five other undergraduate students with the DALI technology & innovation lab, to build the first version of the app within a 10-week period. The DALI team consisted of two developers, three designers, and one project manager (me).

Scope

We outlined five goals for features in the app: (1) account creation and management, (2) reserving product, (3) purchasing product, (4) picking up product, and (5) loyalty & rewards programs. We absorbed unforeseen delays in the third-party companies that handle the Fridge systems by adjusting the scope for the minimum viable product (MVP) to be delivered in the 10-week period to encompass goals 1-3. We successfully delivered the MVP for the app within 10 weeks: the app allows a user to select a Fridge, see that Fridge’s inventory, view products, add products to the cart, and pay for those products by credit card. We also included product recommendations upon checkout by featuring the most popular products in that Fridge (if those products are not already present in the cart). Making reservations and orders go through to the Fridge and allowing the user to pick up their order are the primary goals for the next period of development to occur in the summer of 2019, along with the design of the loyalty & rewards program.

My Part

I worked as the project manager on this endeavor, leading team coordination and clear, consistent communication with the client, laying the foundation for an excellent partnership moving forward. I created and maintained all product strategy documentation, including the project proposal, feature specifications, feature roadmap, as well as all meeting schedules, agendas, and summaries. I also created the final handoff document at the conclusion of the project, with a summary of our work, fully detailed features and next steps, and collateral access information to provide an opportunity for the smoothest possible transition for the next term of work. Throughout the term of the project, I also focused on fostering the personal development of my five fellow undergraduate teammates with biweekly 1-on-1s.

I also took the initiative to take on features of a product management role to better support my talented team, working closely with the developers and designers on the team to drive understanding of the problem statement, insights into the target user base, and features to prioritize, coordinating with the client to align on these.

Given my strong emerging interest in design, I also worked extra with the designers on the team to contribute to the user research and production of some of the low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototype screens.

Project Demo

Process

After completing competitive research on companies with comparable products, app features, and vibes (e.g. Farmer’s Fridge, Sweetgreen, Starbucks), we conducted user research with a small group of Dartmouth students using a predetermined set of questions with the goal of defining user need and pain points. We determined that there is a desire for fast, convenient, on-the-go healthy food options on campus, particularly those that are located on well-travelled pathways on campus (not inside of dining halls) and those that can be purchased on the campus meal plan. From the results of user interviews, we created three user personas that drove our design for the rest of the term.

During Week 4 the designers created greyscales (low-fi mockups without color that can be used to evaluate usability) while developers set up a backend for payments (using the Stripe API) and scaffolding the code with a backend connection to Firebase. By the midpoint of term, the payment user flow was complete, the user could view products and add them to their cart, and the designers had conducted user tests with the greyscales. This user testing showed that users generally found the app intuitive and easy to use, liked the different sign-in/-up options (including the “continue as guest” option and Google, Facebook sign-in), the user flow around product selection, and the information displayed upon product selection. There was some confusion around details of the flow, including the “order code” that appeared after checkout and how to use it. With this feedback, the designers iterated on the greyscale and began the hi-fidelity mockups. Broadly, users loved the simple, clean feel of the app and could see themselves using it on a daily basis if they enjoyed the products.

In the back half of the 10-week period, the developers coded the layout into the web UI as we received feedback from the partners and test users on click-through versions of the mockups. As the hi-fi mockups reached their final stages, developers added styling of the UI. The styled app then went through another round of user testing in which we told encouraged users to find problems with the app (“bughunt”), which informed the implementation approach for the final weeks of development.

The final deliverable the first 10-week term of work was a React Native mobile app from which users can select a 6AM Health Fresh Fridge, see the product inventory in that Fridge, view information for each product, add products to their cart, and purchase those products by credit card.