A Universally Designed Dietary Mobile Application for Healthier Lifestyles

Abstract

Practicing a healthy diet is becoming increasingly important not only because people are living longer, but because they also have a more sedentary lifestyle. Research has shown that using a mobile dietary application (app) could help enhance goal setting and self-monitoring of dietary behaviors. However, when using an app, users can become demotivated if the design of the app is not intuitive and user-friendly. The group of dietary app users varies enormously in terms of their demographic backgrounds, including age, gender, digital skills, and educational level. This means that dietary apps need to be universally designed so that they are intuitive, user-friendly, and accessible to people with a wide range of abilities, disabilities, and characteristics. However only a limited number of studies have focused on making dietary apps more universally designed. In this study, we evaluated three already-on-the-market dietary apps (MyFitnessPal, Lose it!, and MyNetDiary) with 10 participants from diverse backgrounds. The evaluations consisted of usability testing and a semi-structured interview. The outcomes were used to propose an improved design for a dietary app. Universal design (UD) principles, together with Nielsen’s usability heuristics, guided the entire study.