Zeroil
Type: Online to Offline Commerce Platform of Healthy Diet
Role: User Researcher, UX/UI designer
Timeline: Nov - Dec 2015
Team: Meng Wan, Nuomeng Zhang
DESIGN SUMMARY
I started to go to the gym to lose weight from my sophomore year. After a period of exercising, I knew that proper fitness without a diet plan cannot reach my aim. However, college canteen is hard for me to go on a stricter diet. So I didn’t reach my weight loss goal within an expected period.
Zeroil is an Online to Offline (“O2O”) Commerce Product that provides healthy food in universities. Students can buy healthy set meals and share a fit life story on Zeroil. In 2015,”O2O” and”e-business” has been one of the main buzzwords talked about in China. I and my classmate Meng Wan wanted to try this concept. We made a “Healthy Diet” product in our university because “Fitness” was popular among the university students.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
College students who are paying attention to fitness need a way to buy healthy food to meet their diet plan . Because there is no kitchen in a dormitory for them to cook calorie-controlled diet and college canteens can not offer meals with a strict calorie control.
UNDERSTANDING
Target Market Characteristics
· College students are paying more attention to go to the gym and they have the awareness to eat healthy food, but truly understand which diet plan could workout are less.
· Diet plan provides more developed system plan schemes for the user to choose, less considering the individual needs and the special needs of users.
· In some fitness products, there is a large part of the module to create the social network, sometimes seriously deviated from the purpose of fitness, became a platform for the user's body show. Building community is very conducive to the user's self - spread and meet the social requirement, but we still have to grasp the core function.
Target Market Trend
· The menu should be efficient and objective. If users can not reach their aim when eating our food (keep going to the gym), even the community is good, but those more intent users will turn away to other products.
· Female users are the majority and increasing significantly, their motivation even stronger than male.
· User-generated content (UGC) will become the trend in the market, their feelings about keeping fit and diet are more rich, distinctive, updated continuously and meet the needs of different users. It also can bring users a sense of engagement.
RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
Interview
We interviewed 20 students who had been working on a fitness goal (10 male and 10 female) and interviewed 45 students in our universities randomly for getting the following answers.
Affinity Map
We made an affinity map to collect and analyze the interview data. This map guides us to answer the questions we listed, then we built a strategy and cleared the value proposition of our product.
After analyzing the affinity map, we concluded that the value proposition of Zeroil provides professional and orientational diet meal for students in our university. We classified our users into four categories, for “ Pro”&“Medium Level”, besides eating diet meal, most of them are Social-Oriented. For “Beginner”, most of them may not like eating the “diet meal” and they would doubt about the final effect. So our strategy is let the “Pro” and “Medium Level” students influence “Beginner” by UGC. We think we could better increase the retention rate of new users and the volume of interaction from users by “community”.
Competitive Analysis
In the interview, we found that most students did their diet plan in two ways: 1.eating low oil and low-calorie food in canteens, 2. order takeout with a special need (eg. no sugar, low oil ).
After collecting eating data from interviewees, I went to our canteens and ordered takeout respectively in a week to experience these 2 way in person. Then I draw a competitive graph. This helps us decide the standard of our product and assume the “Price”,” Variety”,”The Way of Food Delivered”, which also guide us to find our restaurant partner.
Besides, provide a variety of food and ensure bodybuilding effect, we point at “Waiting Experience” as an attraction. As most students said it is too crowded in rush hour in canteens and sometimes their takeout is unpunctual we think we can provide a better “Meal Delivery Service” for our students.
SOLUTION: Classify, Group, Weekly Menu
Classify:
Classify all food into”Staple food”,“Meat”,“Vegetables”,“Fruit” and“ Nut”.
Group:
1.Different nutrition arrangement for “Weight-losing Meal” and “Muscle-building Meal”.
2.Different nutrition arrangement for “Lunch” and”Dinner”.
Weekly Menu:
Make a fixed menu from Monday to Sunday that includes a kind of meat and three kinds of vegetables for each “Lunch” and “Dinner”.
Deliverable
DESIGN PROCESS
Design Challenge
We found a restaurant which was not busy during lunch time to provide lunch and dinner orders for us. But the main challenge we met is to decide the menu.To ensure the bodybuilding effect and a orientational diet plan, we consulted a coach team to help us make the menu. Our coach team give us a lot of schemes to ensure the variety of the menu. I was hard for “Beginner” to make a suitable dish plan. However, from the point of our restaurant partner, I was concerned about the freshness and quality of the ingredients we provide and the complexity of preparing time.
After 1 month researching and designing, we released ZEROIL on Nov. 30, 2015 to do a four weeks trial operation in our university. We sold 891 set meals in four weeks, and our retention rate is considerable. We earned 12,365rmb ( 24,055rmb in total and 500rmb Server, 500rmb packaging, 10,690rmb for restaurant partner ).
RESULT
FINAL THOUGHTS
We were grateful not only to have been able to solve a real problem around ourselves but also the opportunity to design for an”e-business” product, which was the most popular model of the internet product at that time in China.
I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project. It was my first-time design a product with a business thinking, besides the “ users”, I also put a lot of time to get in touch with the “coach team” and “restaurant partner”. It gave me the chance to get a deeper insight into combining “user” and the business words like “marketing”,”profit” and“operation”.