Spark

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

I'd tried spreadsheets in the past and they were too painful in a mobile context. I tried Airtable as well, but the functionality wasn't quite there.

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 be.
• Even if an app had a demo period, that demo period was too short and forced you to give an email address leading to unwelcome marketing.

I waded through the mess and found two options.

MacroFactor

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 in that time I never mastered the task of quickly adding a meal. Ultimately MacroFactor felt too complex and bloated for my needs

EasyCalorie

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:

• 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.

EasyCalorie was ugly, but it enabled me to do exactly what I wanted to do while feeling good about not being tied into a subscription.

Discovery

A strong point of view

Despite the fact that EasyCalorie was lacking in features— not to mention that it was not maintained and breaking— it still had the simple approach I was looking for.

I set out to make it better.

I identified opportunitites I wanted to explore.

• Persistent calorie target in the top right
• Focusing the core experience around the “calorie ledger”, as opposed 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.

I felt like I was starting to get momentum in the right direction.

A big pivot

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

I wanted to keep up momentum, and I decided that I preferred something usable over more rounds of research.

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.

Design

Resolute Alpha made me rething my approach completely.

That said, there was now a whole different set of opportunitites to dig into.

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.

Resolute now asserted the best of both my original idea and the new GenAi exploration: easily track food and exercise around a central calorie ledger, with easy food lookups and exercise calculations, and future options for label scanning and barcode lookups.

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.