Week 10 Blog Post: Value Proposition

The objective of this week's post is to identify a direct competitor to my product and articulate the value proposition of my product (i.e. why my product is better).

A main competitor I found to my product is Mealime a "healthy meal planning app" on the Android App Store. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mealime&hl=en)






VALUE PROPOSITION

The Mealime app provides a complete meal planning experience. This experience includes creating a calendar, creating meal plans, adding in recipes, and inputting all of the nutritional information for each of your foods. While it might be an all encompassing experience perfect for those who want complete control of their diets, it is not the experience for the average busy user that I am targeting. Everybite is superior in this aspect because it provides a very simple, yet functional interface that allows users to create a new meal-minder in the app with only three taps. My hope is that my streamlined interface will draw in more potential users to this kind of meal-planning app that might be turned off my traditionally complicated apps.
In additional, the underlying goal of Mealime is different from Everybite even though they appear similar on the surface. The goal of Mealime is merely to create meal plans and set up recipes such that they can be referenced later when it is time to cook a meal. In this sense it is more of a meal calendar notebook. Everybite's goal on the other hand is to be the ultimate meal-reminder app. It leaves all of the "what am I going to eat?" up to you, but that's okay because its focus is to remind busy or forgetful people so they don't completely miss that meal. In addition, the possible add-on feature of a meal-reminding coach to the Everybite app would make it even more superior by providing feedback to the user instead of being an input-only interface.

Week 9: Project Status Update

The purpose of this week's post is to provide a brief status update to the lab group and to those unfamiliar with my project.

The product that I am creating is called EveryBite. It is a meal-scheduling mobile app that allows users to set up a meal plan using the device's interface and then reminds them when to have their meals and provides feedback about their performance. The first stage of the project was planning out what I wanted to include in the app and how I wanted to lay out the user interface. After doing some user testing with paper designs and questioning with my brother who is skilled with mobile apps and people in my dorm, I determined that the current design of having a clock interface on the home menu and tabs to access each of the different activities, such as the coach and viewing the schedule, would be the best design moving forward. At this point in the project, I have started developing a prototype of the app in Android Studio for the Android platform to have the basic functionality of creating and viewing meal plans. Specifically, the functionality I have developed so far includes viewing the currently scheduled meals on a clock interface in the main menu, creating a new schedule, and removing events from a schedule. The next steps of this project include adding the functionality to edit events and cleaning up the interface to begin user testing on a finished prototype of the app.