Open Food Facts mobile apps differentiation

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Open Food Facts mobile apps differentiation

Introduction

This is a proposal on how we can differentiate the mobile apps made by Open Food Facts, between themselves and from other apps.

Current state (Feb 2021)

Proposal

We can publish 2 different apps: the "Open Food Facts app" and a new "unnamed food app" with very clear separations of what needs they support and what features they provide.

Open Food Facts app unnamed food app

Tagline: Open Food Facts in your pocket

Focus on the product and on the Open Food Facts database and project.

Key features:

  • Learn as much as possible on any product (checking the OFF page of a product as we would check the Wikipedia page of any subject)
  • Contribute as much photos, data and knowledge as possible to enrich the Open Food Facts database

Target users:

  • People who want to know as much as possible about any product (from time to time)
  • Open Food Facts contributors who want to enrich the database (very frequent and heavy use)

Properties:

  • Completeness and depth to learn or contribute about any aspect of the product
  • Features rich, surface as much knowledge as possible
  • Full contribution experience and tools (Robotoff, OCR, nutrition, categories, labels, image selection etc.)
  • Trustworthy, encyclopedic

Tagline: A personalized food experience

Focus on the user and her or his needs

Key features:

  • Help the user to choose the best products according to her or his personal preferences
  • Help the user to organize her or his food (inventory, best before dates etc.)
  • Help the user to track her or his eating habits

Target users:

  • Users who want to better choose, organize and track the food they eat (daily use to fulfill a specific need)

Properties:

  • Personalized: my theme, my food preferences, my lists etc.
  • Include only features that help completing the user intent, so that it's done as simply as possible, without distractions
  • Simple, quick and painless contribution (only photos)
  • Fun

Design proposal for the unnamed food app

Key features

  • Make the app even more personal by letting users choose an animal, with an associated theme (e.g. a polar bear light theme, a black bear dark theme, but there's room for everyone's favorite animal: owl, koala, panda, penguin, dinosaur etc.)
  • Make the home page focused on one user intent (e.g. "choose" or "organize"), and put only the needed functions there. (we can put a mechanism somewhere to switch between intents, but it's likely that many users will be interested more by a specific intent)

Compared to the current development version of Smoothie (Feb 2021):

  • Put more empty space and less text: make the app look simple
  • Remove or hide features that would be probably rarely used by the majority of users (e.g. search history)
  • Put the focus on scanning (instead of browsing categories of products)
  • Emphasize the personalization of the apps: make the lists with user selected names, icons and colors very visible

Choose, Organize, Track, Contribute modes

The different modes "Choose", "Organize", "Track", "Contribute" share the same basic components like searching, scanning and lists. But the actions differ a bit: in "Organize" mode, users by default search products in their inventory instead of searching in the Open Food Facts database, and the product page shows different information and actions.

Mock-up

Here is an example with a quickly drawn bear. The idea is that we can create theme with an animal and a matching set of colors. Then for each theme, we have a few illustrations of that animal in action (e.g. choosing products, storing products etc.). And of course each animal has different favorite food, and a different way to store it (e.g. the penguin has a freezer).

Unnamed-food-app-design-proposal.1000.png

Source SVG file if you want to play with the design, make alternate suggestions etc.: https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/images/8/8e/Unnamed-food-app-design-proposal.svg

Discussion

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