Spark

When I decided to count calories I weighed my options as to how I would track my count.

In the past I would have used Google Sheets. But spreadsheets are hard to edit in the mobile app, and having tried this for similar tasks I discarded it.

I moved on to the App Store. But most apps from the app store were big misses for the following reasons:

• Overpriced subscriptions that try to force you into a yearly payment. My goal for this app was to be healthy in a few months, not years!
• Not knowing what you’re getting into up front. It’s unclear before downloading an app what it’s feature set will
• Even if an app had a demo period that demo period was often too short and forced you to give an email address, which juest led to unwelcome marketing.

Despite these challenges I waded through the mess and tried my options.

Pros:

• MacroFactor was full of complex features.
• A deep library of foods
• The ability to scan a label to quickly grab nutrition information.
• Tracking protein, fats and carbs in addition to calories.

Cons:

• Quickly adding a basic meal and/or modifying the number of servings was quite confusing, and could not be done in one step.
• Expensive service that tries to lock you in to a yearly subscription.
• Extensive marketing campaigns, which made me regret giving them my information.

Despite the difficulties I used the app doggedly for the 15 day trial, but it proved too complex and bloated for my needs.

EasyCalorie was the polar opposite of MacroFactor.

Pros:

• Simple—type in your calories, hit a button and you're done.
• Tracked calories for both food and exercise.
• The ability to save a meal for future use

Cons:

• While the screenshots don’t reflect this, the app had not kept up with iPhone updates and visuals were janky and many features were broken.
• No Functionality to look up meals, which led me to spending a lot of time on google to assess calories.

needs summaryy...

Discovery

A strong point of view

Despite the fact that EasyCalorie was lacking in features and broken, it still had the simple approach I was looking for.

I set out to make it better.

Key improvements:

• Persistent calorie target in the top right
• Focusing the core experience around the “calorie ledger”, as oppose to the input calculator
• Color coding exercise (burn) vs food (intake)
• Visual UI and branding
• Visual UI and branding
• A fixed price point for a one-time purchase.

Despite these challenges I waded through the mess and tried my options.

A big pivot

It was at this point that I started to tackle the problem of bringing Resolute to the “working software” state.

My approach to research was to get an MVP into the market and see if people enjoyed using it.

I was also itching to launch my own app, and even if it wasn’t successful I knew I wanted to launch Resolute just so I could say I had launched my own app.

So I asked myself, “What is a true MVP here?”

ChatGPT had only been out for a few months at the time, and somewhere along the way I had this idea to try it for this task. I created at ChatGPT applet which I named “Resolute Alpha.”

It changed everything.

Not only did ChatGPT record calories, it would look up nutrition information and offer words of encouragement. It truly felt like a game changer.

Despite how great it was there were still flaws to improve on.

Design

After a month using Resolute Alpha I sat down with my learnings:

Pros

• Easy experience—type in what I ate or the exercise I completed and it did the rest.
• It created context for me to make adjustments, so it might put me in the “average,” but give me the context to make adjustments if necessary.
• It added a green dot to my calorie status so I could quickly find it.
• It offered words of encouragement.

Opportunities

• I still found myself wanting a persistent number that showed my latest calories.
• I wanted my calorie ledger to be on the main screen.
• I wanted the ability to statistically track my progress.
• The GenAI gave verbose responses. I tried asking it not to be verbose but it didn’t seem to understand, so I wanted this ability in settings.
• If I asked it to list my daily calories or summarize my calories for the week it would get confused.
• Sometimes calorie estimates were way off. This was usually easy to recognize, but was an error I never had when I was manually looking things up myself while using EasyCalorie.

With these learnings in mind I pivoted my design approach to be based around GenAI, but with the refined improvements for a calorie counting context.

Clickable prototype with Figma

After designing a core design experience, I knew I would have trouble articulating the advantages of this design until someone saw it in action.

I took my designs one step forward to create a clickable prototype in Figma.

Build

I’m excited to bring Resolute into the Build phase.

I originally thought I would try my hand at building it myself, but that would probably take me nine months and I’d rather be designing the next app.

Currently seeking a collaborator to bring Resolute to market. If you have passion for this type of project you should reach out!