Whole App

This project was part of business ideas for startups contest, started in Helsinki. The guideline was developing new services to decrease the spending on healthcare.

We were provided with a set of data from the Finnish Ministry of Health covering both financial and medical information, and no border was set, aside a three months deadline for initial propositions.

Role: Service Designer + Videomaker
Team size: 4 people
Extent of the project: 3 months full-time

🧘🏻 Background

Four of the world's top 10 risk factors causing death are linked to unhealthy diets, including arterial hypertension, high blood glucose, obesity and high cholesterol.

The approach and the quality of people’s groceries is heavily influenced by culture, workplace and wealth. As many people don’t know what is healthy or what their body needs, it's hard for them to understand what makes their eating habits good or bad.

🎢 Strategy and process highlights

Framing the issue to address

1. Based on the data we were provided, only 9% of people look at the calorie count in products, and about 1% look at other components (total fat, trans fat, sugar, and serving size) on almost all labels.
2. Our research was oriented in discovering current solutions to provide health information related to food, focusing on customer-oriented services.
3. Most of them - usually apps - required much effort to have customised reports, like manually inserting each product's information in the app.

Exploring a solution

1. Those finding started shaping the landscape for our business idea: a smartphone app, to provide nutrition data and statistics about the people's groceries based on their shopping history.
2. Connecting our infrastructure to the databases of supermarket chains, as well as credit and loyalty cards providers, we could automatically acquire products' data right after the checkout, providing a customised report effortlessly.
3. Building up a database of products and best-practices on diets, we could support writing healthier groceries’ lists, based on previous ones lack of food typologies, guiding people through a new healthy lifestyle.

Defining the business value

1. The solution we envisioned had shared benefits on multiple stakeholder levels. Focusing on the goal of the challenge, we based our business model on making the service completely free for the citizens.
2. Therefore, we define a business model based on multiple revenue channels, to preserve the independency of the platform, avoiding concentrating the commercial value on single body.
3. Advertising capabilities can be offered to supermarkets and produces by suggesting specific products to each customer, as hints right in the groceries list, with a strong need-solution connection to be monetised.
4. The solution also provided an added value for loyalty or credit card circuits: health could definitely be a stronger driver aside of collectable coupons and prizes.

Develop a prototype

1. I made some animations in After-Effects to test out the best way of displaying data in an interactive way, using sample data from our own groceries, based on a spreadsheet I developed to simulate how the algorithm providing diet suggestions could work.
2. Still, the main role of the set of prototypes in this project was delivering the complexity of the project during a presentation. We simulated a little basket of groceries and a checkout, showing the app on the projector's screen and launching the video playback in the exact moment the payment was done.
3. This was also he occasion to write a privacy statement to be direct and clear: the system aggregates anonymous information from customers, as well as suggestions from supermarkets and from healthy food suppliers. The information was integrated and combined. Any sharing with third party subjects would have had no direct connection to any individual customer.

🍻 Failures and learnings

Well, the biggest failure/learning we brought home from this concept was being in a "grey area" which at the end didn't turned appealing from both the institutional and the commercial points of view.

Our solution was considered too commercial to be perceived as an institutional campaign for national healthcare, while on the other side commercial bodies weren't really convinced about the revenue streams we identified.

A big lesson brought home was also how getting deep in an unknown topic, intersecting both ethical and commercial needs, really helped us quickly frame a reference model to analyse current solutions to the problem, leading us finding a valuable and sustainable business opportunity.

📽 Video